PS 3545 

.0465 

P6 

1918 

iv Copy 1 



THE POET IN THE DESERT 

By CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD 

A NEW VERSION 






Book__ 

Copyright N°_ 

ORMGHT DEPOSIT. 



I^HE POET IN 
THE DESERT 

BY CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD 

h 



[A New Version] 



PORTLAND, OREGON 
I9I8 



COPYRIGHTED BY CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD, 19*8 



PRESS OF 

F.W.BALTES AND COMPANY 

PORTLAND, OREGON 



! A K M C /I QQ 
vci^ ui, H U \f ( 

DEC i I 1913 



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«0 { 



THE POET IN THE DESERT 



I have entered into the Desert, 

The place of desolation. 

I have come to the great immutable one 

In her sanctuary. 

She sits on a throne of Light, 

Her hands serenely clasped; 

Her lips tranquil as Dawn; 

Her eyes solemnly questioning. 

I have come to the lean and stricken Land, 

Which is defiant and fears not God, 

That I may meet my soul face to face; 

Naked as the Desert is naked; 

Bare as the great Silence is bare. 

I will question the Silent Ones who have gone 

And are forgotten. 

I will question the expectant host 

Which shall come after; 

By whom I also shall be forgot 

As the Desert is defiant of all gods, 

So am I defiant of all gods, 

Shadows of Man cast upon the fogs of his ignorance. 

A helpless child following the hand of its mother, 

I put my hand into the hand of the Eternal. 

I have come to lose myself in immensity 

And to know my littleness. 

To lie in the lap of my mother 

And be comforted. 

I am alone, yet not alone. 

My soul is my companion above all companions. 



Behold the signs of the Desert: 

A buzzard afloat on airy seas, 

Alone, between two infinities, 

As I am alone between two infinities; 

A juniper-tree on a rocky hillside, 

Dark signal, calling from afar off, 

That the weary may rest in shade; 

A monastery for the flocks of little birds 

Which hurry by night across the barrenness 

And hide happily in the heat of the day; 

A basaltic-cliff, embroidered with lichens, 

Illumined by the sun, orange and yellow, 

The work of a great painter, 

Careless in the splash of his brush. 

In its shadow lie timid antelope, 

Which flit through the sage and are gone ; 

But, nevertheless, become loving unto love. 

An ocean of sage-brush which dimly breaks 

Against a purple coast too far away; 

White alkali-flats, shimmering as 

A mirage of beautiful blue lakes, 

Constantly retreating. 

The mirage paints rivers on the sky, 

With cool and willowy banks; 

The thirsty ears can almost hear 

The lapping of the waters, 

But they flee away mockingly, 

Leaving the thirsty to perish. 

I lie down on the Desert, 

Sifting the warm sand through my fingers, 

And to me it seems that Life has its mirages also. 

Behold the signs of the Desert: 

The stagnant water-hole, trampled with hoofs; 

About it shine the white bones of those 



Who came too late. 

A whirling dust-pillar, waltz of Wind and Earth; 

Glistening black walls of obsidian 

Where the wild tribes fashioned their arrowheads. 

The ground with fragments is strewn, 

Just as they dropped them, 

The strokes of the makers undimmed 

Through the dumb and desperate years; 

But the hunters have gone forever. 

The Desert cares no more for the death of these 

Than for the death of the armies of crawling crickets. 

Dazzling in the sun, whiter than snow, I see the bones 

Of those who have existed as I now exist. 

The bones are here. Where are they who lived? 

A thin veil of gnats buzz their hour. 

I know they are my brothers, and I 

Less than the dial-shadow of this rock, 

For the shadow returns forever. 

Silence invincible; impregnable; 

Compelling the soul to stand forth 

And be questioned. 

Night overwhelms me. 

Coyotes bark to the stars. 

Upon the midnight sand I lie, 

Thoughtfully sifting the earth 

Through my fingers. 

I am that dust. 

I look up to the stars, 

Knowing to them my life is not 

More valuable than that of the flowers; 

The little, delicate flowers of the Desert, 

Which, like a breath, catch at the hem of Spring 

And are gone. 



I have come into the Desert because my soul 

Is athirst as the Desert is athirst: 

My soul, which is the soul of all; 

Universal; not different. 

Athirst for the waters which make beautiful the path, 

Enticing the gracious and benevolent grass, 

The willows and poplars, 

So that in the bewildering heat of the day 

We may lie in their shadow, 

Soothed as by the hands of quiet women, 

Listening to the discourse of running waters, 

The voices of happy women 

Exchanging confidences of love. 

The little rivers run away from the rugged Titans 

Who are jealously wrapped in cloaks of azure. 

They steal out into the bosom of the Desert 

And the willows follow after, waving their hands, 

Calling to them, "Run not so fast away." 

They weave a green carpet in a barren place, 

And build a safe fortress for the birds. 

They are the water-bearers 

For all the shy things athirst in the Desert; 

But at last the impatient life-givers 

Marry the far-spreading marshes 

Which in the jubilant Springtime are green, 

In Autumn, copper-red. 

The tule-rnarshes are sanctuaries for herons, ibis, ducks, 

Cradles for the stately cranes which when the year fades 

Circle high in the blue and cloudless dome, 

Calling for the Southland. 

Who is their monitor? 

Who is their pilot? 

The mountains belt the Desert with amethyst 

And girdle her with opal ; 

Lifting their heads into the vault of Time, 



High above our tribulation. 

Their airy castles are set upon 

Foundations of sapphire. 

My soul goes out to them as a bird to her secret nest. 

The mountains are the abode of peace ; 

The vexed soul's brooding place. 

Behind them Creation slumbers, a naked god; 

His head pillowed on a riven rock, 

Molten in chaos; 

Dreaming of the greater gods to come. 

Who shall awake him? 

Shall the flowers awake him with their tender fingers, 

Or with the music of their tremulous bells? 

Larkspur and blue-bells, lupin, spikes of lapislazuli; 

Wild sweet-william, pink as Aurora's bed? 

Sunflowers on rocky hillsides, 

Flaunting their banners of conquest? 

Or the far golden sea of rabbit-brush 

Which rolls to the sunset? 

The flowers bloom in the Desert joyously, 

Careless whether they be seen, or praised. 

They do not weary themselves with questioning, 

But blossom unto life perfectly, 

And unto death perfectly, 

Leaving nothing unsaid. 

They spread a voluptuous carpet for the feet of the Wind 

And to the frolic Breezes which lightly overleap them, 

They fragrantly whisper: 

"Stay a moment, Brother; plunder us of our passion. 

"Our day is short, but our beauty everlasting." 

Never have I found place or season without beauty: 
Neither the sea, where the white stallions 
Champ their bits and rear against their bridles; 
Where the floor of the world is laid in purple 



And the Sun walks in gold and scarlet. 

Nor the Desert, sitting scornful, apart, 

An un wooed Princess, careless, indifferent; 

Spreading her garments wonderful beyond estimation, 

And embroidering continually her mantle. 

She is a queen, seated on a throne of gold 

In the Hall of Silence. 

She insists upon humility. 

She insists upon meditation. 

She insists that the soul be free. 

She requires an answer. 

She demands the final reply to thoughts 

Which cannot be answered. 

She lights the Sun for a torch 

And sets up the great cliffs as sentinels. 

The morning and the evening are curtains 

Before her chamber. 

She is cruel and invites victims, 

Restlessly moving her wrists and ankles, 

Which are loaded with sapphires. 

Her brown breasts flash with opals. 

She slays those who fear her, 

But runs her hand lovingly over the brow 

Of those who dare, 

Soothing with a voluptuous caress. 

She is a courtesan, wearing jewels, 

Enticing, smiling a bold smile; 

Adjusting her brilliant raiment negligently, 

Lying brooding upon her floor, richly carpeted; 

Her brown thighs beautiful and naked. 

She toys with the dazzlry of her diadems, 

And displays the stars as her coronet, 

Smiling inscrutably. 

She is a nun, withdrawing behind her veil; 

Grey, mysterious, meditative, unapproachable. 

8 



Her body is tawny with the eagerness of the Sun 

And her eyes are pools which shine in deep canyons. 

She is a beautiful swart woman, 

With opals at her throat, 

Rubies on her wrists 

And topaz about her ankles. 

Her breasts are like the evening and the day stars. 

She sits upon her throne of light, proud and silent, 

Indifferent to wooers. 

The Sun is her servitor, the Stars her attendants; 

Running before her. 

She sings a song unto her own ears, 

Solitary, but sufficient; 

The song of her being. 

She is a naked dancer, dancing upon 

A pavement of porphyry and pearl, 

Dazzling, so that the eyes must be shaded. 

She wears the stars upon her bosom 

And braids her hair with the constellations. 

I know the Desert is beautiful. 

I have lain in her arms. 

She has kissed me. 

I have come to lie on her breast 

And breathe the virginal air 

Of primal conditions. 

I have come out from the haunts of men; 

From the struggle of wolves upon a carcass, 

To be melted in Creation's crucible 

And be made clean. 

From her mysterious chamber 

I hear her whisper: 

"Only Man has defied his Mother 

"And set up the idols of his ignorance. 



"Only Man has denied Freedom, 
"And cherished ugliness." 

I will not climb the Morning peaks 

And, like a lark, shoot my exultant song 

Down to the shadow where the millions drudge 

And the children are born to labor, 

But I will lie a mourner upon the bare 

And barren bosom of the primeval Mother. 

I will chant a dirge unto Civilization. 

I cannot sing of Beauty, for Man has put a scar 

Upon her forehead and twisted her exquisite limbs. 

I cannot sing of Truth, for Man has never yet 

Perceived the flashing of his eyes. 

I cannot sing of Justice, for frowning Justice stands 

On a great height, scornful, like a dark cloud 

Brooding on a mountain. 

I cannot sing of Freedom, for Freedom is beyond 

This present Night, like a star 

Kissing the edge of the world. 

Poets have sung of Freedom, but never 

Has Freedom pressed Man's pale lips. 

Poets have sung of Justice, but Justice 

Has not dwelt in the haunts of men. 

Poets have sung of Beauty, 

But who has perceived her, 

Or who has been folded to the resilient 

Perfection of her bosom? 

Poets have sung of Truth, but who 

Has been burned by the lightning of his eyes, 

Or swept by the rushing of his wings? 

Truth, dweller in the starry places, 

More elusive than moonlight upon the sea, 

Your brow is infinite as Night 

10 



And your eyes deeper than the skies 
Of the Desert. 

Where are you, Truth? Let me behold you. 

Shadowy, appearing, disappearing, ever retreating. 

As the mirage of the Desert which lures to the glittering 

Death-spaces beyond; advancing; never overtaken. 

Your smile serene as death, your hand comforting. 

The majesty of the Desert terrifies me: 

Vast, vague and empty. 

Still as the spaces between the stars, 

So that I hear the murmur of my heart 

And am afraid. 

I look up to the sky which is eternal, 

And down to the sand which is eternal, 

And I am afraid of my littleness. 

I know the brevity of my existence, 

The passing of a cloud-shadow. 

I salute the little mottled lizzard 

Intently watching me. 

I salute you, Brother. 

Yet I know I am greater than you; 

Than all else greater. 

I am to myself greater than the Desert, or the world, 

Or the far-removed, alien stars, 

Curiously peering. 

I am in a mysterious way 

Part of Eternity, as well as of Time. 

When I have saluted Death and taken him by the hand, 

I shall be absolved and know no more; 

Even as these white skulls and ribs know no more. 

Nevertheless, I am now a part of Time 

And shall be part of Eternity, 

Indestructibly as the sun or the stars. 



ii 



Where are you, Truth? Where are you? 

The Desert is so pitiless. 

I am afraid of its bigness; 

Its indifference frightens me. 

I am alone, an atom thrown out 

From Eternity into Time; 

Allotted to do my part. 

I will do my part, and it shall be my own. 

I will refuse to be moulded in the common mould; 

To step regularly according to custom; 

To measure myself among monotonous patterns. 

I will cast off my fetters and, even in rags, 

Like a street singer, I will sing my song. 

I will wander imperiously, destroying the paths, 

The moulds and the patterns. 

II. 
POET: 
Your face is pale as the earliest dawn 
Before the birds have awakened. 
Your feet are lilies by the rim of a pool; 
Your wings the mist of a cataract 
Wherein the captive sun plays, iridescent. 
Your face is strong, 
The abiding-place of Sorrow. 

TRUTH: 
I am the sword-bearer. 

POET: 
Of my heart, I desire you. 

TRUTH: 
I will awaken your eyes. 

12 



POET: 
I see a dark cloud eating up the light of the world. 

TRUTH: 
Ignorance, the blight of the world. 

POET: 
I hear distant thunder, 
At which my flesh shudders. 

TRUTH: 
Groans of the poor. 

POET: 
I see a monster. 

His feet are of gold; his hands are of gold; 
Golden is his head and his legs are golden. 
His heart is of clay. 
His greedy hands are folded upon 
His swollen belly. 

Into his maw flows an endless procession: 
Men with grey faces; women with sunken eyes, 
And the little children who have never laughed. 

TRUTH: 
Civilization ! 

POET: 
He sits upon a crimson pedestal. 

TRUTH: 
The blood of men. 

POET: 
It rests upon a great Darkness. 

13 



TRUTH: 
The soul of Man. 

POET: 
He sits within a golden temple, 
But squatting on the roof is a vulture 
Whose wings darken the horizon. 
Idolaters crowd into the Temple 
And circle about the pedestal, praying. 
Their prayer is loud, so that it blows into the street, 
And like dust is whirled into every corner: 
"O, God of Gold, let nothing be changed. 
"We are comfortable. 
"Slay the wicked who seek to change 
"The Things that Are. 
"Let them be crucified." 

TRUTH: 
Change is the breathing of the Universe. 
Sacredness is Nature's scorn; 
Idolatry her contempt: 
A bandage to the visioned seer; 
A pitfall to the feet of the runner; 
Pitch clogging the wings of eagles. 
Nature welcomes her children's sacrilege. 
There is nothing holy in her eyes. 
To her sacrilege is the greater holiness. 
She is a common book, open to the blunderer, 
Setting him straight; 

Prodigal and patient with the persistent ones; 
She is cold to those who will not invade her. 
To become sacred is to end. 
Nature is without end; wonderful. 
With her nothing is sacred and 
In her everlasting temple none need kneel. 

14 



POET: 
Is not Man of Nature, too? 

TRUTH: 
Her child, whom she so loves 
That if he heed not her voice 
She will lay him in his grave, 
As a mother her beloved babe 
In the cradle. 
She utters no commands. 

But she has established immutable conditions: 
The Thunders and the Waters certify her, 
Night and Day give her praise; 
Health, Sickness, Death, 
The inevitable Seasons praise her. 
By freedom she evolved the body of Man 
And shall evolve his wondrous soul 
In the free and forward aeons. 
Noble is the struggle and great the hope. 
Not worms and butterflies, 
But from worms, butterflies. 
One ultimate progression. 
Man's soul, Nature's soul 
And he its nursery. 
The well-ordered garden of Freedom; 
Wherein the best live; the worst die; 
As a gardener culleth. 

POET: 
The air is thick with tired eyes which look 
Toward me hungrily. 

TRUTH: 
The eyes of the poor, 
Who before they were born 
Were disinherited. 

15 



POET: 

Who has right to partition out the sea, 

Fence the invisible air, 

Or claim monopoly in the benediction of the rain? 

Is the solid earth less the general gift than these? 

TRUTH: 
A monster devours you. 

POET: 

Where is this monster? 

TRUTH. 
Within the azure vault; 
Upon the moving air; 
In Earth's deepest heart and on 
The wide, rebellious sea; 
In shadowy alcoves of the mossy woods 
Whose columns root upon the breast of Time. 
It hates great Nature's voice, 
Fashions the tyrant-sword, 
And hatches devouring War. 
It snatches men out of the healing air, 
And denies them the breast of the Mother, 
Except for a grave. 
It devours the little children 
Whose fingers are so soft, 
And feeds on babes, blinking innocently, 
E'er they have waked to the morning. 
It gluts on the breasts of mothers, 
And on the hearts of resolute men. 
It blows a blighting breath against the soul. 
The people before it are dumb, 
And stretch their throats to its fangs. 
It seizes its victims and they become 

16 



Tame as bleating sheep. 

It parcels the people into obedient flocks 

Which patiently labor. 

It gives the earth to the few 

And makes them masters of their brethren. 

Wash your eyes in dew from the mountain-top. 

Look for the day. 

Brotherhood one with Self-hood, 

And Self-hood with Brotherhood. 

Man stretching his wings, 

Shaking his plumes 

Before the envious Sun, 

And Freedom shooting gleams across the sky, 

As welcome to the soul as summer morn 

Unto the dawn-mad anarchy of birds. 

POET: 
Even birds make songs and puppies laugh. 



III. 
POET: 

I know not my beginning; neither whence nor whither; 

But I perceive my own littleness and my own greatness. 

I am one with the mole, blind, beneath the grass; 

But one also with the burning sun; 

One with the rolling and majestic earth; 

One with the limitless skies, 

Which move to their destiny helpless as I. 

I am child of the generations, 

And father of the unborn. 

I am not only myself, but all men: 

The dead, the living, and those to come. 

Who is not father to all children? 

Who is not child of all mothers? 

17 



Who is not brother unto all who live? 

Murderers, thieves, prostitutes, all criminals, 

You are my brothers and my sisters. 

Yet my hand has been at your throat; 

My insolence has reviled you. 

Before you were born, I prepared you 

For the brothel and the gallows, 

And before you were born 

I prepared the brothel and the gallows for you. 

I have consented to the conditions 

Which lay with you in your mother's womb. 

I have made you murderers, thieves and prostitutes. 

Little children, O little children. 

You are mine as much as you are your fathers'; 

Yea, more; beyond the count of suns. 

He is the father who is the elder, 

And who, having knowledge, deserts you, 

Betrays fatherhood. 

I will not desert you. 

Though I could weigh the soul and balance it 

And know Life's beginning and Death's ending, 

I would not desert you. 

Little helpless children, 

It is not right that you be born to die 

Before ever you have lived. 

I know Life has not been hurled at us 

As a sharp and poisonous javelin. 

I know it is an alabaster-cup 

Offered by a hand unseen: 

Aloes and honey and the wine of dreams. 

I will not make a song of balmy Spring 
Which lifts so shyly her ecstatic veil, 
Jeweled and odorous; 
Nor will I sing of Summer, the voluptuous, 

18 



Charming with her discourse when all the birds 

Have sunk to silence. 

Nor celebrate the prodigal magnificence 

Of bough-bending Autumn, 

Richly caparisoned, whirling the painted leaves 

As a strong youth at play; 

Nor honest Winter, that mimicry of Death, 

White, quiet, cold and fallen to rest. 

How can I sing of the playground 

While innocent children labor? 

Or tell of golden abundance, 

While children stare into the grave? 



IV. 

I will sing a psalm of affliction and of tears. 

I will sing a dirge of darkest night 

When the stars hide their faces 

And the thunders shout a paean 

Of vengeance and deluge. 

Here in the lonely wilderness, 

In the abode of meditation, 

Unannoyed by the clamor of men, 

Let me speak so men must listen: 

Those who buzz this little hour 

And those to come. 

Upon the darkened earth I see a marsh, 
Putrescent, bubbling, vast; here and there 
Flowers slowly arise, a moment bloom, 
Then sink beneath the rottenness. 
Above it, on a dizzy crag, 
His face calm as the mountain, 
Towering Justice stands, 
Holding in one hand a torch 

19 



And in the other the lightning's sword, 
Point down; not yet uplifted. 

I shrink before his voice, 

Slowly, without anger, saying: 

"Man! Man! 

"You have lighted the earth with corpse-lights; 

"Jack-o-lanterns of a foul and fetid fen. 

"It is nothing that you have touched the sky 

"With your iron towers of Babylon, 

"Leveled the mountains, harnessed the cataracts 

"And put the insurgent ocean into bonds. 

"You have loosed eagles to snatch joy 

"From between the lips of children, 

"And have suffered the usurper to make 

"Mothers unfit, hating motherhood. 

"Fathers unfit, cursing fatherhood. 

"Who has given to any possession of his brother? 

"Or said to any, 'The earth is yours. 

" 'Your brother shall be your tenant.' 

"Who has made the people slaves 

"On the breast of their mother?" 

O for clean-limbed, clean-souled men and women. 

for free sky, earth, water, 
And free-winged souls. 

1 had rather taste the common lot and be 
A man full-statured, 

Than live like a louse on the backs of the Poor. 

V, 

Who can set a limit to the soul? 
Who can explore the infinite? 
The soul, infinite as the skies; 

20 



As unapproachable, uncertain. 

I cannot reach to the uttermost bounds 

Of the soul of the one I love. 

No, not even of the one I love. 

Though we are comrades and eagerly try 

To approach each other, 

There are spaces not to be crossed, 

Where we wander utterly alone; 

Inarticulate. 

I cannot probe even my own soul. 

It eludes me; dissolves and flies 

Like a mist in deep canyons, 

Where I cannot follow. 

I am a stranger to even myself. 

Mixed, compounded and conditioned 

By the unknown forces 

Which have harnessed the stars. 

A mystery to myself; 

To my dearest a mystery. 

He who shall look upon the last sunset 

May boast he has known the soul of Man. 

VI. 

Behold the preachers, 

Self-elected keepers of the soul, 

To whom the infinite soul is a simple thing, 

Easily unraveled. 

Somber is their garb; 

Somber their thought; 

Their teaching is somber. 

They preach Love with the lips, 

Yet their hearts joy in Force. 

By Law they would change the foundations of God. 

Their mouths are empty with noise; 

21 



Their eyes, raised to Heaven, see nothing. 

They are a flock of crows which tear up the corn 

Before it has sprouted. 

They suck the egg before it has wings. 

Each sees his narrow shadow and thinks it God, 

But is blind to the handwriting of buds, 

Deaf to the instruction of birds, 

The teaching of the little calves, 

And the sermon of the Seasons. 

Swollen in their own conceit, 

They will not drink from the same chalice 

With the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; 

Puffed with the pride of Ignorance, 

They refuse to know the beautiful Oneness. 

As for me, I throw my arms out wide 

To the green Earth, the air, the life-giving Sun, 

Praying that the Unknown Majesty, 

Of which I am a part, 

Make me brave for the struggle; 

Put wings on my feet that I may walk 

In the upper paths, 

Searching desperately to know all things; 

Humbly knowing I shall never know; 

Guessing that Beauty is goodness, 

And Sin ugliness. 

O, unseen, unknown, unapproachable, eloquent mother, 

Hushing, soothing, endlessly beneficent, 

Continually rocking my cradle, 

Kiss me with your large tranquillity, 

And give me understanding. 

Teach me the universal love. 

Teach me the universal wisdom. 

In life make me reach toward death, 

22 



And in death toward the life 

Which shall ceaselessly come after me. 

Helpless am I, your child, 

Knowing my ignorance. 

O, infinite mother. 

VII. 

The idolaters cry "Agitators" against those 
Who stand upon the street-corners, saying: 
"Go to, now, ye rich men; weep and howl, 
"For your miseries which shall come upon ye. 
"For your gold and silver is cankered. 
"Behold the hire of the laborers 
"Which have reaped down your fields, 
"Which is of you kept back by fraud crieth: 
" 'Ye have condemned and killed the just/ 
"If a brother or sister be naked 
"And destitute of daily food 
"And one of ye say unto them: 
" 'Depart in peace; be warmed and filled,' 
"Notwithstanding ye give them not those things 
"Which are needful to the body, 
"What doth it profit?" 

The Idolaters are worshipers 

Of the things that were; 

Greedy for soulless things; 

Eagerly crucifying the Masters of the Soul. 

Though a Christ died daily, 

They would not understand him. 

VIII. 

Beloved Nature, lay on me 
Your cool and benedictive hands; 
Wrap me in your infinity; 

23 



Wash me clean of the turmoil; 

Bathe me in your eternal pools 

And draw into your bosom all my fever. 

Release me to embark upon the clouds, 

Wander with the vagabond winds 

And from this shore, voyage to the far country 

Of the undiscovered soul. 

Lift me upon the sunrise and unlock 

The sunset gates which lead 

Along the paths pebbled with stars. 

To this richly crowded tent let me invite 

My Soul and hear its eloquence. 

Give into my hands the stars 

Rising above this world, 

And from their invisible fountains 

Shed on me the dews of Peace. 



IX. 

Man declares a sanctity in cloth, 

But not in the flesh of babes. 

The Patriot bares his head before a flag, 

But in its fluttering shadow he 

Is stricken down with clubs. 

Authority, Authority! O Authority! 

The garments of the rich are a passport; 

But the rags of the Poor are friendless. 

Holier to me than any flag, the tatters of her 

Who should be a full-bosomed mother; 

More eloquent to me than banners, 

The pathetic patches of Labor; 

I had rather keep in my heart 

The sacraments of Freedom 

Than dull my questioning mind 

With blind idolatry. 

24 



Why should I, who soon will drink 

The comfortable cup, 

Shower rose-petal words upon the backs 

Of toil-bowed men and women 

Whose ears are stopped by Grief? 

Shall I twitter a morning song 

While millions lie cold in darkness, 

Or sing the rhapsodies of love 

While my unhappy sisters barter 

For bitter bread, or brittle pleasure, 

That sacred fire, more elder than the Sun, 

Lit in Eternity, purer than Purity, 

Sheltered by the old, dead gods? 

I will respect no idols. 

I will examine all things. 

I will fear nothing, 

But fearless I will grip 

The hands of the gods and cry, 

"Hail, Comrades, I am your fellow." 



What is Man that he should oppose himself to Nature, 

Or think to know her infinite perfection? 

To one who stands upon the promontory of a star, 

Are not the ants and bees as precious? 

Their knowledge admirable? 

Nature, wonderful in the infinity of her largeness; 

The infinity of her smallness? 

A clod of the field as mysterious as a star, 

A grain of dust as marvellous as a mountain? 

The trees, grasses, fruits and vari-colored flowers, 

Man and all that is are from the dust, 

Continually arising, feeding, expanding, 

Continually returning to the source. 

25 



The weeds have the benignant care of the Mother 

As perfectly as the wide-spreading oaks and lofty firs, 

The children of men not any more her solicitude 

Than the babies of the beetle 

Which tenderly she feeds in their dark 

And earthy lodgings. 

She holds the suns lightly between her fingers, 

Yet delights in atoms our eyes cannot see. 

The ant-hill as dear to her as a city. 

Yea, dearer, for the little folk know freedom. 

With them, Justice plays awhile. 

These curious architects will yet build 

In the streets of the proudest city, 

If the city find not freedom. 

Nature has established eternal conditions, 

Leaving all free to seek life or death; 

But the way of the transgressor is death. 

She governs nothing; 

Commands nothing; 

Enforces nothing. 

How then shall the smallest soul 

Be governed by another? 

The things unseen destroy the body 

And the things unseen destroy the soul. 

Man lives and dies upon a world he cannot see; 

Yet he would control the soul of his brother. 



XL 



As a little child winking in its cradle, 
I gaze at the roof Wonder has put over me 
And see it frosted with sparks of eternity; 
Forever beyond my finger reach, 
Inaccessible; past my comprehension. 
I do not seek to control them, 



26 



Yet I seek to control the soul of my brother 

Which also is inaccessible; 

Beyond my comprehension. 

I find no flaw in the marching of the worlds, 

Or unseen gathering of the crystal dew, 

Or raging of the relentless sea; 

Nor in the glow-worms, which, though they bear 

Their lamps humbly, are as perfect 

As the sky-flooding moon. 

Yet I, who have not the light 

Of a glow-worm, would instruct my Mother. 

I look upon the rivers which hurry 

From the full breasts of the mountains, 

Rolling boulders with dull noises 

And carrying the wreckage of Time 

Upon their foaming frontlets. 

Though they obliterate a city, 

Shall that impeach their flowing? 

Carvers of the eternal channels, 

Levelers of the hills, 

Jubilantly tossing the sun in their hands; 

Bearing poppy-wreaths and chaplets of wheat 

To the goddesses in the meadows. 

Because sailors sink in the deep, 

And throw up vain arms to the void, 

Shall the moving battlements of the sea be fixed? 

Or the winds sleep forever? 

Because we lift our frightened hands 

To a mocking sky, shall the Earth 

Cease from her travail, 

Or the chariots of the stars be stayed? 

Out of destruction Nature brings new life, 

Continually changing her wreck to beauty. 

But the wrecks of Man are cherished by him. 

He delights in ugliness. 

27 



XII. 

Man has weighed the stars, 

Caught the lightning in its course, 

Peered like a curious child into his own cradle ; 

But never has he controlled the fixed conditions. 

If he will not swim with the benevolent current, 

As the willow-leaf, in September, 

Floats happily on the force of the river, 

The resistless flood shall strangle him. 

XIII. 

When I look upon the roof of Night, 
I marvel that there be one who cares 
For what another thinks; 
Or in the bigness of this universe there be 
A soul so small to heed the multitude, 
Or feel the sting of ignorant opinion. 
I know for every one, were he but bold, 
Surely along some starry path, 
His soul awaits him. 

I, too, am part of the cosmos 

And should sweep free in my orbit, 

As the stars in theirs; 

Yet I take my place with yon little lizard 

As one of the children of Creation. 

Dimly, I begin to know that Nature 

Has designed freedom for every one, 

Without exception; 

To each the possession of his own soul. 

These thoughts penetrate me, 

Even as the insistent sap penetrates 

To the tips of the leaves, 

Loosening their baby fingers. 

28 



XIV. 

Man mistakes the thud of his feet 

For the irresistible rolling of the spheres. 

He is willing the Great Mother 

Should go about her work freely in his body, 

Casting out the poisons which destroy him, 

But he is not willing she should freely 

Purge the poisons of the greater body. 

Even the beasts accept the impenetrabilities 

Of infallible Nature; 

But Man has substituted an image of himself, 

Who for prayers and petty bribes pretends 

To modify those edicts which lit 

The fires of Creation, 

Guide the stars in their wandering, 

Weave the wings of the wind, 

Shape the crystal orbs of the rain, 

Not caring if the fields have sinned, 

And, tenderly as the spawn of Man, 

Nurse the silver spawn of the herring 

Amid the brown and undulant seaweed. 

TRUTH: 
Nature is simple, yet inscrutable; 
Always impregnable. 

POET: 

Nature is herself the stars, 
Determined; unvarying. 

TRUTH: 
She claims no authority; she invokes no force. 

POET: 

She knows no rulers. 

29 



TRUTH: 
She seems deaf, but her deafness is wisdom. 

POET: 

She seems blind, but her blindness is vision. 

TRUTH: 
She seems cruel, but her cruelty is mercy. 

POET: 
The merciful mother is merciful as a mother. 

TRUTH: 
She keepeth the race. 



XV. 

Behold the silver-kirtled Dawn, 

Life-renewer; Harvester of gloom; 

Bright Bringer of good hope. 

The skies are listening to Earth's silence. 

The Desert sleeps, but her wild children, 

Like fretful babies, stir upon her bosom, 

And the Comforter casts abroad her gossamer mantle. 

The prowler of the night, 

The lean coyote, 

Slips to his rocky fastnesses, 

And noiselessly, through the grey sage, 

Jack-rabbits shuttle. 

Now, from the castle-ated cliffs 

Rock-ravens launch their proud black sails. 

Wild horses neigh and toss their manes, 

Trooping back to pasture; 

Orioles begin to twitter. 

All shy things, breathless, watch 

30 



The thin, white skirts of Dawn, 

The Dancer of the sky, 

Tripping daintily down the roseate mountain, 

Emptying a golden basin. 

A red-bird, dipped in sunrise, 

Cracks from a poplar top 

His exultant whip above a silver world. 

XVI. 

My eyes are afflicted by the coming of day. 

I see an endless procession, 

Flowing from life unto death: 

Smileless, submissive, starvation-carved, 

Life-marred, soul-stunted; blurred to obliteration. 

I hear the hungry roar of furnaces ; 

The clang of hammers and the clank of chains; 

The clash and clamor of steel-plates; 

The evil rattle of steel-cranes. 

I am deaf with the bellowing of monsters 

Which feed on men. 

They belch their smoke against the sky 

And below, in the cloudy steam, 

Naked men sweat like the damned, 

Slaves to the demons which they guide. 

Grimy alchemists, with faces wan, 

Who dully change dull iron to dull gold. 

An iron world without a soul; 

The patient sky above waiting; 

The patient men below waiting. 

The blue sky above forever listening; 

Expectant. 

The tired men below forever listening; 

Expectant. 

The flaming sun above ordering abundance; 

3i 



The flaming hell below denying enough. 
Forever clamoring; forever devouring; 
Devouring the men who are mates for mothers; 
Fathers, steel-muscled, broad-chested, dominant; 
The women, mothers of children, 
Weary mothers. 

Women, crypts of the ages ; flexible, undulant, 
The innocent children, with white bodies, fluent, 
Bearing the seeds of the unknowable Future. 

XVII. 

The miners swarm from their hovels in the grim dawn; 

Their faces lusterless; their backs bent, 

Battered tin buckets swing in their hands, 

Censers of the God of Gold. 

Their faces are patient as a dog's before his master, 

Blanched so pitiful that the grime upon them 

Is dark, like the tally-mark of Death. 

Into the rayless galleries 

They bear feeble little torches, 

All the sun and moon their poor life knows; 

And in their souls they bear little torches, 

All the light their dark life knows. 

The sun forsakes them as they go down into 

The dripping corridors, 

And sitting on the shoulder of each, 

Crouching close at his ear, is the black harpy. 

They rain gold into their owners' laps. 

Their Masters bask in the sun 

And breathe the bright air 

Sifted by the leaves, 

But to the toilers they toss only enough 

Of the spoil of their combat to keep Life's 

Thin, grey smoke ascending. 

32 



XVIII. 

I hear the roll-call of the woodpecker, 

Drumming Pan and his little goat-mouthed satyrs 

From the shadowy forest to the orchard; 

And the melancholy note of the cuckoo, 

Hid in the oak-tree, calling plaintively 

The coming of rain. 

I hear from rocky hillsides 

The mournful cooing 

Of doves near the bubbling spring, 

Bordered with cresses. 

High against the sky, with iron bill 

Rattling, deafening, reverberant, 

I hear the iron woodpecker 

Pecking the steel bolts of the girders. 

I see men running about on girders and beams, 

Human spiders, weaving an iron cobweb; 

Running about recklessly, 

As if the air were their home. 

A sudden slip, a swift rush to Eternity. 

A spider of the iron web lies still. 

And fledglings in the nest, 

Waiting with open mouths. 

A coat blots out the sight. 

Nothing is ever blotted. 
Even the grass-roots remember 
When they have fed on blood. 
Justice, relentless, clear-visioned; 
Red drop for drop, carefully insisting 
That the debt be paid. 

XIX. 

I see my white-faced sisters of the foul tenements 

Stooping over their needles, 

Which flash faster than the wings of the dragon-fly, 

33 



Or the fangs of the quick-coiling serpent. 

Their fingers are yellow, the fingers of the dead; 

The thin fingers of those who have died of hunger. 

Without pause, not daring to lose a moment, 

They snatch at the crust of their starvation; 

Bending close above the garments, 

And the murmur of their hearts is continually: 

"Lest we starve ! Lest we starve !" 

I see my haggard sisters of the prisoning factories; 

Their eyes sunken and their mouths chiseled by grief. 

Their yellow hands are the talons of an eagle. 

The clamorous looms catch up the souls of the workers 

And weave them into cloth; 

The souls of submissive women woven into cloth; 

The woman, left a husk before the loom. 

O, the din of the mind-madding looms. 

The devil-dance of the shuttles. 

They weave up the freshness of Youth, 

The silver thread of children's lives, 

The morning roses of maidens' cheeks, 

The whiteness of mothers' breasts: 

Pure ivory bowls of far Eternity 

Which should be beautiful. 

XX. 

My little sisters, my pretty little sisters, 

Dawn in your cheeks; 

Stars in your eyes; 

Your bodies bathed in a wine unpurchasable ; 

Chattering like children, 

Flitting to the market-place, 

Yourselves merchandise, 

Girlish little sisters; 

Thoughtless, unafraid. 

34 



I have seen innocent, pretty birds 

Walk into the trap 

Which destroys them. 

They twitter joyously, 

Preening themselves; 

Glossy and beautiful; 

Turning their heads gracefully, 

Ere they pick up the corn 

Which betrays them. 

O, my little sisters, my pretty little sisters. 

TRUTH: 
The Devil's auction. 
The daughters of the Poor for sale. 
Three dollars a week; three and a half; 
Four, five ; five and a half. 
The innocent young mothers 
Sold at the Devil's auction. 
Eyes more precious than agates, 
Chalcedony or sapphires, 
Shining pools of the evening, 
Wherein the stars dance, 
And under the fringe of the border 
Runs a liquid moon. 

Cheeks more delicate than the wild-rose 
Of the canyons; 
Bosoms pure as pond-lilies 
Swaying on ripples. 
Lips dewy as Aurora new-bathed 
In the flattery of orient seas. 
My sisters, my trusting little sisters, 
Shall you not snatch at roses 
Drooping heavy for the picking? 
Shall you not walk in the poppied paths? 
Shall you be hungry and taste not of the grapes? 

35 



Shall the young mothers be blighted? 

Souls leaning upon Hope, 

With the yearning of woman's love? 

Has the vaunted God baited you for destruction? 

POET: 
I will not shirk my own work upon 
A pasteboard God. 
I have consented and approved. 
O, my little sisters who should be flowers 
Magnificently seeded, 
Your eyes are already weary 
And your lids droop toward oblivion. 
When I walk alone and look into the sky, 
I do not see the watchful orbs of night, 
Only the melancholy eyes of the Unborn, 
Staring at me with the implacable demand: 
"Must we, too, die not knowing Joy?" 
When in the leafless trees I hear 
The soughing of the winter wind, 
It is to me the voices of little children 
Without childhood. 
The sobbing of the brooks quarreling 
To their stones, 
Is the sobbing of mothers 
Who curse motherhood. 
The hissing rain, the hot salt rain 
Of women's tears, 

And the hesitating footsteps of the wind, 
The hope which has died. 
The cries of the poor are more melancholy 
Than the wail of the curlew in the night ; 
The crash of imperious ocean, 
The snarling of Law which destroys manhood; 
But the roar of the tempest is the fury of those 
Who will some day shake their fists against God. 

36 



Out o£ the shadow an army of ghosts, 

With twisted limbs and distorted mouths, 

Beckon to me. 

"How long, Brother, ere you come?" 

The waters and many-tongued leaves 

Call continually unto me : 

"How long, Brother, ere you come?" 

Even the silent stars whisper to me, 

"You are consenting." 

Nature's desert is clean and the bones of the dead 

Shine white as pearls, 

But the desert which Man has made 

Is filled with dead men's bones 

Rotting in darkness. 

XXI. 

Where Silence sits with covered head, 

I hear mocking laughter. 

Our weak and helpless sisters, 

Whom we have made, 

And whom the Holy Ones have cast out. 

O, sisters of men, fountains of life, 

Wondrous weavers of a mystery; 

Gardens wherein the Future shall blossom; 

Tall Sybils who interpret the morning; 

Lamps of the Soul and moulds 

Of the generations; 

Torch-bearers approaching from the sunrise 

In infinite procession, and in infinite procession 

Diminishing into the sunset. 

My sisters, have you drunk a poisoned cup? 

Why are you so madly merry? 

You have drawn curtains between you 

And the pitying Night, 

And with lamps have blotted out the stars. 

37 



You have made Night shiver 

With your mad and reckless laughter, 

Your mad and reckless songs. 

Against your window and against the night, 

Stars showing through his skull, stands Death. 

He, too, is laughing, fiddling, singing. 

His laughter is madness; 

He sings his own relentless song. 

He sings the death of your souls ; 

Not only the death of your souls, 

But of mine, also. 

In the endless Past we were one, 

And in endless Time we are one. 

You are the absolute moulds of the future. 

There is one waiting for you, my sisters, 

Unnoticed, just around the corner; 

His lean fingers playing with a shroud; 

On his grinning head a withered wreath. 

They call you Daughters of Joy, 

But on your pillow, no matter who else rests there, 

Lies a dread head with cavernous eyes. 

A sharp sword is in your bed; 

The sword of the Reaper. 

He reaps not your death only, but mine. 

Not my death, nor yours only. 

He reaps the death of the Race. 

The lips of beautiful women 

Made poisonous as the bite of a serpent. 

Man's falsities poisoning the River of Life 

Under the Cliffs of Eternity. 

XXII. 

Shall I sing of Morning 

While the daughters of Day are sick? 

Shall I celebrate the defeat of Night 

38 



While they hide before the pageant of Day? 

I cannot sing of Morning 

While the daughters of Day shut out the light. 

I cannot sing of Love 

While the keepers of Love's house 

Sell Love upon the street. 

No, they sell the godhood of their bodies; 

But Love they cannot sell. 

Love is unsalable; unpurchasable ; omnipotent. 

None can compel him. He is his own master, 

Going and coming as he please. 

The torch of Day lights the Earth, 

But they who hold the torch of Life 

Are set to illumine Hell. 

Who can delight in the limitless arch 

Divinely hung with worlds, 

While the mothers of worlds, divine as stars, 

Blaspheme the Night? 

XXIII. 

My sisters, once you were little girls, 

Little mothers to dolls ; 

Longing to be loved. 

Do you remember the call, insistent, 

Which you did not understand? 

The willows feel the persuasive incantation of Spring 

Which they also do not understand; 

Yet they become proud with silver studs 

And hang out the golden tassels of their fruitfulness, 

Inviting the bees. 

You have come to us, my sisters, 

Out of the Unknown, as the white wind-flowers 

From the dark Earth in the silent forest. 

The Ages deliver you to us white with purity, 

But men violate your sacred bodies 

39 



And sully your unguessed souls. 

Nature has named Love holy, 

But Man has mumbled his fetich Marriage 

Holier than love. 

You have been used and despised; 

Despised and used. 

The sacramental-vessel a ewer 

For the washing of hands. 

The love-flame a lamp to light a sordid house. 

Do men who use you say, "Here are the altars of Life 

"Which we will approach only at the call of the Master 

"And before which we will worship reverently?" 

When they have used you, they spit upon you 

In their morality, 

And push you, dishonored, into the street; 

Closing the gates upon you. 

They spill the wine and pollute the altar. 

Sealed by the Infinite unto Love and Trust, 

By Love and Trust you are betrayed. 

Nature has moulded you perfectly, 

But Man has broken the statue 

Which stands in the portico of the temple. 

XXIV. 

In the forgiving moonlight, on a slab 

Of the silent and deserted morgue, 

A woman lies, more whiter than the moon. 

Has Love turned murderer? 

Who put a blot upon her whiteness? 

She were not shamed unless Man shamed her. 

The beasts of the field have purer knowledge, 

Knowing that motherhood for love is sufficient, 

And Love for motherhood is sufficient. 

Does a god slay his god-head, 

40 



Or the keepers of Life willingly 
Deliver Life unto Death? 
Have the keepers of the blood, 
That wondrous juice which has crept 
From out the farthest rift of Time, 
Chosen to pollute the blood? 
Have the mothers of children 
Chosen to destroy the child? 

It is beautiful to see a bitch 

Anxiously huddle her puppies; 

A cow lick her trembling calf 

With adoration. 

The shy doe of the wilderness 

Will return to her death 

At the bleat of her fawn. 

Only Man compels motherhood to the morgue; 

And mother- joy to the abortion-chamber. 

TRUTH: 
Hypocrites, worshiping a lie. 

POET: 
The mothers degraded and the children blighted. 

TRUTH: 
If one be degraded, all are degraded. 

POET: 

The roots perish and the buds wither. 

TRUTH: 
If but one perish by a lie, the lie must perish, 
Or all will perish. 

4i 



POET: 
The fruit of a lie is destruction. 

TRUTH: 
Like the stars, certain in their appointments, 
Retribution will come in its unvarying circle. 

POET: 
Love, creator of Creation; 
Maker of all; 
Sovereign of the soul; 
Mysterious mechanic; 
Gardener of the world; 
Laughing fisherman gathering all 
Within his net; 
Master of the Universe, 
Riding upon the stars for steeds; 
Whirling the suns, 
Binding the rebellious comets; 
Holding the Unknown captive. 

Shall Man with his crooked fingers, 
Like a child upon the beach, 
Build a sand-rampart to hold 
The furious surges of the sea? 
Shall the spotted lizard of the desert 
Control the pilgrimage of the stars, 
Master the pregnant tides, 
Or turn the rivers back 
To their inaudible beginnings? 
Man may squint at the heavens, 
Dance before his own shadow, 
Cherish his ignorance 
And bow before his puppets, 

42 



But he cannot control Love, 
The Beginning and the End. 

TRUTH: 
By the great Original 
Who stirred the slime primeval, 
Shall a mincing monkey invade the garden 
Of the gods and with a dirty ringer 
Touch lilies, hyacinths and roses, 
Smirking, "This shall be moral; this immoral. 
"This pure; this impure ?" 

POET: 

Surely the dawn will appear. 

TRUTH: 
The clock of the Heavens is set for eternity. 
The infinite Ages but a point on a line 
From infinity to infinity. 
Man never flew with wings, 
But slowly, as a snail, 
Zigzagged upward on the cliff of Time, 
Reaching, trying, feebly feeling, yet still 
Wandering upward 
Through the dim aeons. 

POET: 
O, what is the hope? 

TRUTH: 
By Freedom ye shall put on wings. 
As from the caterpillar the gilded butterfly. 
Then who shall guess the flight? 

43 



POET: 
I will be my own moralist 
And Nature shall lead me. 

I will follow her like a little child who stumbles, 
Holding the hand of its mother. 

XXV. 

Come, I will open the gates unto Love. 

His wings shall cover the world. 

He shall wander gleaning the fields, 

Garnering a good harvest. 

He shall gather the flowers of the world 

And weave them into crowns, 

As little children braid corn-flowers 

And gather dandelions, with laughter; 

As maidens gather rose-buds, 

Which because of their sweet odor 

They place in their bosoms, 

Leaving blood upon the thorns. 

My soul thrills, even as I think the laburnum 

Thrills with the April sap, longing to link 

Her chains of gold. 

I am glad with the robins which unrestrained 

Build homes in the maples for love, 

And the swallows which build under the eaves. 

Their nests are frail things, 

But the foundations are strong. 

I rejoice in the hills which draw their veils 

About them like brides. 

I perceive the grey and drifting sky freely 

Enfolding the strong hills, 

As women enfold strong men; 

My heart sings to the unfurling of the leaves; 

44 



I seek my laws in the hills and fields. 

I know that Freedom is Nature's ordinance. 

Resolve the sprouting of a grain of wheat, 

Or shy unwrapping of the oak's young leaves; 

The poppy-seeds' insistent copy 

Of the parent scarlet; 

Make but one poppy-seed; 

Yea, but one poppy-seed, 

Which shall sprout and grow 

And work the flaming miracle. 

Then such a man might dare to say 

Unto his brother: 

"Thou shalt, or thou shalt not. 

"This for you is right and this is wrong." 

O, who can make a seed of grass, or bud, 

Which with its secret alchemy 

Expands and flowers 

And bears its proper fruit in its own cycle? 

TRUTH: 
But it is childish-easy to destroy. 

POET: 

Or who can fashion forth a soul? 

TRUTH: 
But it is easy to destroy a soul; 
The very pastime of Civilization. 



XXVI. 

Birth is pure, as Death is pure. 

Was ever a child begotten impure, 

Or a baby born wicked? 

I will not sing the ecstacy of the birth-pang 

45 



Till Birth be free as Death; 

Nor will I voice the nobility of Motherhood 

Till all motherhood be noble as Life itself. 

I will sing a song of Bastards: 

The free children of free mothers. 

O, noble company of bastards, 

Beloved of the Great Mother, 

You are her petted children, born of her own desire. 

She has given you the stars for playthings 

And taught the winds to bring you offerings ; 

She has said to the Sun, "These are your brothers;" 

And to the Moon, "These are your sisters." 

She has lain close to you in your secret cradle 

And whispered to you the music of the sanctuaries. 

She has dangled before your eyes pictures 

Of the undiscovered world. 

For you she has woven wreaths of bay 

And crowned your brows with laurel. 

She has not held back the mystery 

Of your creation till Authority give consent; 

Nor delayed the hour of your coming 

For a priest's incantation. 

She has not branded "Bastard" on your soft palms, 

Nor on the pink soles of your little feet. 

She is ignorant and indifferent 

That you are baby breakers of the Law. 

She laughs scornfully at the laws of Priests and Rulers. 

She has set her own brand upon your souls, 

And has given you place in a glorious company: 

Poets, musicians, painters, declarers of knowledge; 

Governors and captains, seers and conquerors; 

William the Bastard, of Normandy, 

Alexander Hamilton, D'Alembert, Leonardo, 

And the Great Deliverer, standing alone, 

Sad, silent, rugged, a storm-beaten spruce 

46 



On a seaward cliff; melancholy; misunderstood of men, 
And tenderly patient. 

Birth earlier than Death, 

Next step toward the Infinite. 

Last link between the unvisioned Future 

And the unknown Past. 

Within its mystery, all mysteries. 

Back to that dim time when creation was, 

And the young stars danced in their glory; 

When giant lizards swam on sunset-seas 

And leviathans crushed through ferny forests; 

On to that time when man shall live perfectly, 

As the stars walk their celestial paths, 

Nor ever stumble. 

Birth, echo of Eternity. 

Earth's purest purity. 

The latest note in Nature's passional. 

XXVII. 

Not till Man be lawless will he be lawful. 

Not till he may be immoral will he be moral. 

Not till he may be impure will he be pure. 

The soul of Purity is Beauty. 

Behold the grass and the trees. 

Do they think fearfully lest they offend 

The grass and trees of yester-year? 

As the trees blossom so should man blossom. 

The apple-trees, unchecked, to red or golden fruit; 

The locust-trees tossing their blonde curls 

To seduce the Breeze with honey. 

When the trees feel the sap stir, 

Do they ask leave to blossom? 

O, that everywhere were the laughter of children 

As in Spring everywhere the singing of birds. 

47 



How shall I publish the march of the Seasons 

Until everywhere the breasts of mothers are full? 

Shall I concern myself with the distant stars, 

The hushed murmur of amorous leaves by night, 

Stand with young lovers in the enfolding darkness, 

Or listen to the songs of lovers who beget new slaves, 

Till Love is free? 

Shall I shrill in the feeble voice of the katydid, 

Or chirp a querulous tune, 

Like a blackbird clinging to a cat-tail 

Above a marsh? 

I will petition the free things. 

I will watch the whirling skirts of Rain 

Coming down from the hills, 

Flaunting diaphanous draperies. 

Delightedly I will watch the new-born buds 

Weaving veils of verdure; 

And rejoice in the singing of grasshoppers, 

Crickets and cicadas, 

Little unseen poets, 

Chanting the mystical passion of Summer. 

For them the world is free. 

We watch Creation set aflame her pageantry of worlds 

And light her candles in the halls of space, 

Yet dare to beckon almighty Love from Heaven 

To fat an obscene god with guts of gold. 

Shall we who look up to the stars 

From a level no higher than the tortoise, 

Nay, cannot soar so far as the dusky beetle 

Fasten shackles onto Love? 

XXVIII. 

I know what Nature is and her largesse. 

I know her beauty is infinite; 

Her freedom perfect and her tenderness everlasting. 

48 



My throat yearns to sing a song of beauty, 

For my soul keeps in its secret chamber 

The madness of a wind-swept hill-top 

Where, from under a shading laurel, 

We watched the white clouds lure the winds, 

Their lovers, 

Down into the caverns of the sky. 

Little birds fluttered in and out the leafy coverts; 

Hawks skilfully slanted to the breeze 

And squirrels ran about, sitting erect, 

Suddenly questioning. 

Flowers blossomed without a governor, 

And the beautiful madrona-trees, 

With limbs smooth as the limbs of nymphs, 

Whispered to the roving Winds. 

There are hills for all and oaks for all, 

And the airy blue covers the world. 

From the hill-top we saw the skyey threads 

Which are the rivers. 

I may go down to them and lie by them, 

Refilling the vessels of my soul; 

Listening to the secret conversations of the waters 

Which carry me afar, enchanted and enthralled; 

Like half-heard, mystic, murmured incantations 

Of soft-shod, hushed magicians 

Who lift me sleeping, and in Lethean langour 

Bear me unto the perfect meadows 

Where the white-handed nymphs await my coming, 

Riding within the fragrant fringes, 

Slender rushes, mint and mallow; 

Hearing the continuous warble of the hidden nymphs, 

Their far, faint laughter. 

49 



O, young lovers, 

I call you to lie upon the grass 

And listen to the river's muttering. 

Little children, splash your white bodies 

With bright crystals. 

Hear the indignant magpies screaming 

From the willows, royal fellows, 

In black-and-white, who surely were once 

A prince in ermine. 

All the beasts and fowl of the Desert 

In the evening come here thirsty 

And the river refuses not life to any. 

Far down its course it is led out 

Upon the alfalfa-fields, where poplars 

Watch about the garden. 

An old man stands upon the bank. 

To him the voices of the water murmur, "Peace." 

They are calling to him the inescapable call 

Which the soul struggles to answer. 

But, to the haggard ones who toil, 

The soliloquy of the waters 

Comes grumbling and growling, 

As the voice of Moloch: 

"Work! Work! Work!" 

Endless as the river's flowing: 

"Toil! Toil! Toil!" 

Ceaseless as the river's murmur: 

"Never! Never! Never!" 

Knowing peace or beauty. 

The workers know not the song of the waters, 

Nor the sympathy of the grass; 

Nor bathe their souls in the pools of leisure; 

Nor ever cast their eyes 

Where the clouds, reckless, set their silver sails 

50 



Upon the upper main. 

Enviously they look upon the meadows where 

The carefully tended cattle lie among the buttercups. 

As fledglings stir within the nest, 

So the Poor stir a moment in a cloudy morning, 

Eut are quickly devoured by the dark coming eagles. 

They know not the sweet, respected weaknesses of age. 

Age cannot work, and Death delays too long. 

XXIX. 

This is the pedigree of Degradation: 
Authority, father of laws ; 
Laws, father of Privilege; 
Privilege, father of Poverty; 
Poverty, father of Degradation. 
I am a reaper in disordered fields 
And the sheaves which I gather are 
Despair, drunkenness, crime, hate, ugliness, 
Churches, jails, the palaces of the idle rich 
And the filthy nests of the debased poor; 
Tormenting pain, unsatisfied longings, 
A killing hunger of the body; 
The hunger of the soul denied. 

Shall I pity the debased ones and not pity 
Those who have wrought the debasement? 
Shall I forgive the criminals, haughtily, 
And go my way and forget their fashioners? 
What trick of the great wheel, invisible, 
Gave to them their places, and to me mine? 
I have not wrought myself in any part, 
Nor have they wrought themselves. 
We are thrown off, as bubbles of the sea. 
We are thistledown which voyages upon 

5* 



The unseen air, 

Or the globed gossamer of the dandelion 

Which the wind seedeth. 

There is not one who would not rejoice 

To walk erect, knowing man's nobility, 

Leading his soul up to tranquil heights, 

To sit a little while beyond the clouds. 

There is none who does not prefer 

To walk in the fields, psalm with the birds, 

And in the vastness of the morning 

Drink the air of grandeur. 

XXX. 

Benevolent Night, kind nurse to weariness, 

Who delicately draws her draperies about us 

With caressing fingers, and drops from pitying lips 

Kisses for those who weep. 

Benignant Night, 

Expanding, sheltering, absorbing, renewing; 

Soft, vague, elusive, mysterious, 

Mercifully enfolding the nakedness of the World. 

The watchful trees seem to sleep, 

But are sentinels for lovers, 

Beckoning them to quiet cloisters; 

Breathing on them balsam and leafy odors. 

O, tender Night, soothing, protecting; 

Sending up mists like veils; 

Shrouding all things ; 

Making the groves secret and sacred; 

Filling the void with vaporous masses; 

Infiltrating the mind with wonder; 

Leading out our thoughts to mystery. 

The great spaces are opened up. 

The largeness of Creation penetrates us. 

52 



Even as we let fall our impeding garments, 

So we strip from our minds the confusion of the day. 

O, all-embracing Night, wherein I may loose my soul. 

Great bowl of purity. 

Cool and healing stream, 

Endlessly flowing between the days. 

To the Poor night is welcome only 

Because, like Death, it brings oblivion; 

Cessation of labor. 

They do not thrill with the calls of night-birds; 

The faint cry of the spotted night-hawks, 

Wheeling high above the city, 

Dropping their cries from the star solitude; 

Nor ever listen to the plaintive shrilling 

Of insects bidding farewell to Summer. 

Or, in the purifying silence, rejoice at 

The metallic orchestra of swampy frogs. 

Do they who wrest all things from the Mother 

Know the kindness and infinitude of the Mother? 

They neither know the dazzl'ry of the sky-hung lamps, 

Nor the blaze of that lower firmament 

They themselves have created, to sparkle 

Afloat upon the darkness; 

Caught by the rivers 

And twisted into golden serpents, 

Tangled with the Moon. 

They are too tired to know 

Night's dark and deathless beauty. 

But I know that Night is the holiday of the Soul 

Who then runs abroad, meeting her companions; 

Even the trees and the rocks voyaging as far 

As Aldebaran. 

Yea, the Night gives into my hand the stars 

53 



And hangs above my narrow bed 
A canopy of wonder. 
In the Night I meet my own Soul, 
And together we wander, listening. 

XXXI. 

Morning, the great architect, is gilding 

The dome of the World. 

Hope is growing bright upon the clouds of my soul. 

I lie within the shelter of desolation 

And steep my soul in meditation. 

The night has shrunk away over the edge 

Of the Desert; 

The coyotes have ceased from their shrill lamentation; 

Shepherds call to their woolly flocks, 

The rosy hill-tops waken to gladness, 

And presently, like a fiery harlequin, 

The Sun will vault over the purple barrier 

And swing his golden torch abroad. 

I rejoice in the silent consolations of the Desert 

And am soothed by the tenderness 

Of the new-waked breeze. 

The aromatic smell of the sage-brush is good. 

Beautiful the circling of hawks and buzzards; 

Melancholy the cooing of doves 

And the little cuckoo-owls 

Complaining from their burrows. 

These things, and more, 

Penetrate my heart with gladness. 

I have heard the morning merriment of nymphs 

Who spread a carpet to invite the gleaming 

Feet of Spring; 

The twinkling feet 

54 



Of shy, persuasive, mystic, rhythmic Spring; 

And the hushed, persistent laughter 

Of brown-armed dryads 

Who lie beneath the oaks in Summer, 

Rejoicing in a coquetry with trees. 

In the great silences I catch the song 

Of Earth's singing: 

The voices of my little brothers, the frogs, 

Who wake to Spring, well knowing the appointed hour; 

The monodies of crickets and grasshoppers, 

Insistently composing anthems 

Of Love and Death. 

Have you not heard the utterances of the guardian rocks 

And the low psalming of the mountains, 

The bare hills, flashing skies and clouds? 

The hushed communion of the brotherhood 

Under the snow? 

The drums of the sea and trumpets of the wind? 

Each may receive his separate message, 

If he will. 

And my ear is tuned to the voice with which 

They speak to me, separate and apart: 

The mysterious trees who reserve their 

Confidences, wonderful, for those they love; 

The grass to which you must listen carefully, 

And all those shy things of the forest, 

Tremulously hiding, 

The vagabond army of the roadside, 

And the weedy pools. 

They shout to me as I go by, 

"Hello, Comrade." 

The jeweled tops which spin above me at night; 

The mighty mystery of sand and lava, 

Preciously holding echoes of 

The awful detonations of their fiery birth; 

55 



The bellowing of bulls, calling of rams, ewes and goats, 

Bringing messages from the first pastures; 

The still small voice of a single grain of sand. 

I rejoice in the clear exultance of birds 

When the buds put forth again; 

The pridefulness of anxious mothers 

When, from sunny thickets, 

They teach their young to fly. 

My chained heart gossips with them 

As in painted Autumn they gather together 

Before they travel Southward on the unruled air. 



XXXII. 

I will stand upon the star Arcturus 

And know my littleness. 

This wheeling orb of my imprisoned destiny 

But a grain of dust twirled between 

The palms of the Infinite. 

Ourselves, not greater to the Universe 

Than sand-fleas on the glistening sands. 

I have denied Nature and falsified myself, 

But now I stand in this Desert and bare my soul, 

Even as the primeval Desert is bare. 

I lift up my face and stretch my hands to the sky, 

And in this place of Solitude cry aloud: 

"O, Nature, only Creator and only God, 

"Unknown and unknowable, 

"Implacable and eternal, 

"Teach me, almighty Mother, 

"Which of us is the sinner: 

"My sister, whom I have enslaved, 

"My brother, whom I have disinherited, 

"Or I, who have falsified your conditions?" 



56 



TRUTH: 

By the eternal Silence, you are answered. 

POET: 

Here is a seed covered with thorns, 

Which blows about the Desert 

And fastens in stony ground. 

I will be such a seed, bearing thorns and a new life. 

I will go to Nature, as a child to its mother. 

I will place my hands between her knees, 

And my head in her lap. 

I will rest in her bosom, and she shall nurse me. 

I will obey her in all things, 

And she will feed me with Freedom, 

Sweet as wild honeycomb, 

With a sharp tang, in the mouth. 

TRUTH: 
There is no sin, save rebellion against Nature. 
Man makes sin, and the strength of Sin is the Law. 



XXXIII. 

The Idolaters crov/d into the temple of the Vulture 

And bow down to the bellied God, saying: 

"Why should the little children filter 

"The skyey gold through their fingers? 

"It has never been so. 

"Upon thy altar we stretch Beauty, 

"A young girl, naked, and stab her 

"So her heart-blood runs down to the ground. 

"We feed to thee 

"The Thinkers who patiently unravel 

"The careful secrets of the Universe; 

57 



"All who strike the rocks 

"And cause water to gush forth, 

"And those who make the Desert to blossom. 

"We feed thee the men who might be gods 

"And the tall women, lilies of the world. 

"Those who hold the lamp on high; 

"Those who strike stones from the path 

"And make easier the way. 

"The weavers of sweet sounds 

"Whose billows break against an invisible shore. 

"The poets, singers of the soul; 

"Those who dream divinest dreams; 

"Wayfarers toward the future. 

"We feed thee Love, Brotherhood, Mirth and Thought. 

"That Tomorrow from whence we hear dim songs; 

"That Beauty which is deathless, beyond weighing." 

XXXIV. 

I will sing a song of Cities, 

Sirens who sit upon the rocks 

And lure the adventurous youths 

With their singing. 

The Imperious Ones who bathe their feet 

In the running waters and flaunt 

Their triumphant banners against the morning, 

Chanting songs of combat. 

For the night-watches 

They put on their burnished armor 

Thick with jewels, and marshal 

Their golden phalanxes to the water's edge. 

Upon the hills they set watchmen 

With sparkling torches; 

They slumber as a queen surrounded 

By her glittering hosts. 

58 



The Irresistible Ones, 

With stony smile and marble breasts, 

Smiling, beckoning as the Desert smiles 

And beckons. 

Beautiful, Debauched Ones, deceiving, betraying 

As the Desert deceives and betrays. 

Barren deserts where the multitude 

Wander in pursuit of enticing mirages; 

Deserts filled with flowers among the stones. 

Scarlet and purple haughtily blooming 

And white stars timidly hiding in the barren crevices. 

Voluptuous, magnificent mistresses giving birth, 

And secretly by night changing to vampires; 

Ogresses devouring their lovers; 

A mad woman crooning over the corpse 

Of her child. 

Mills which grind the bones of men; 

Stoney hives whose honey is bitter, 

And drones eat the sweets thereof; 

A courtesan tossing her handkerchief 

Insolently to the pitying moon. 

How often under the moon I have heard 

The sob of the grief-carved channels, 

Where the red stream chafed against the walls, 

Each drop isolate, desolate, 

None knowing another; 

The over-full channels, flowing, ebbing, 

Forever flowing. Roses on the current 

And broken boughs. 

How often have I heard the scream of Poverty 

As Winter chased her, naked, over the stones. 

Tall Titans, overpowering, majestic; 

Challenging with a beautiful defiance. 

Domes, spires, minarets, towers, cloud-touching roofs, 

59 



A crown for the Earth, in mighty fret-work 

Set with brilliants and wrought by 

The miracle-working jinns. 

Streaming plumes, exultant, and scarfs restlessly coiling 

In soft convolutions. 

Streets, turbulent and murmurous, 

Which the cleansing rain turns to mirroring streams. 

Blazing, bewildering rivers of light, scintillant, reflecting, 

Beside which sits a sensuous barbarian, 

Crude, childish, inviting, covered with jewels, 

Proud, self-confident, wondering, staring. 

As a tiger languidly licks the hand of her tamer, 

The waters sleepily lick the feet of the docks, 

And play lazily about them. 

Along the wharves lie the great steamers 

Musing on conquered tempests, 

Their hollow entrails gorged with the spoil 

Of many ports. 

And they wait for the plunder of the world: 

Ingots of silver, gold of wheat and corn; 

Oranges, lemons, hides and glass and cotton; 

Coal and salt, wine and figs and iron; 

Machinery and silk, tea and bags and crockery; 

Boxes, bales, carboys, crates and casks and barrels, 

All the gleanings, delvings, hammerings of Man. 

Here slim-sparred vessels cease from waving 

Their masts to and fro against the sky 

And rest awhile. 

Little dirty tugs, servants in authority, 

Puff fussily about, 

And donkey-engines cough intermittently; 

Swinging the intelligent derricks, 

Lading and unlading. 

Longshoremen, in faded flannel shirts, 

60 



Open at the throat, showing brawny breasts, 

Run back and forth with their trucks, 

Breathless. 

How encouraging is their strength; 

Their muscles' silken play; 

Exquisite; wonderful; 

Powerful to accomplish when Justice 

Is foreman of the world. 

They are skilled athletes, 

But they earn not the leisure of athletes. 

Theirs is the sweaty arena. 

They are the soldiers in a great battle. 

But share not the glory of soldiers. 

If one stumbles, others pass over him. 

If one be wounded, he is lost. 

Ruthlessly thrown on the scrapheap. 

Long freight-trains rumble through the night 

And in the early morning, with a sudden crash, 

Stop beside the warehouse. 

Their husbands, the huge engines, 

Trembling with power, 

Go away, panting. 

They have done their service. 

How beneficent the service 

When Justice shall hold the lever. 

Truck-men, their naked arms shining with sweat, 

Snatch the trains empty. 

And amid shouting at horses and men, 

Crack of whips and honk of horns, 

The trucks and auto-trucks are loaded, 

Hurrying into the canyons of the city. 

When Justice walks shoulder to shoulder 

With the workers 

The cities shall hum with gladness, 

As hives in June. 

61 



The stones of the city are without tongues; 

But they are eloquent. 

Their laughter is cold; but their tears are hot. 

They weep for the little mothers who smile, 

Selling themselves for bread. 

And the cripples with leering hypocrisy 

Who prey upon a greater hypocrisy. 

Luxury tramples Misery, and Misery exults secretly 

At the day when it shall trample Luxury. 

The churches of the city are open, but empty; 

The jails are closed, but full. 

■» 
The jails, the pulse of the Soul's sickness. 
Why may the dwellers never know the calm 
Of the shadowy forest? 
Nor ever see the feathery-ferns 
Spread their extravagant plumes 
And the mosses enamel the trees? 
I have smelt the salt of the sea, 
In the streets and the river-wind has crept 
Up the alleys to kiss my cheek, 
But not to kiss my sisters, 
Nor my brothers in the festering jail. 
Even in the streets I have tasted 
The spice of the mountains, 
And kissed the lips of a lost dryad 
Strayed to a fountain; but my jail brothers 
Never loaf on the breast of our Mother. 
How crowded with the Masters were the jails 
If jails were a place for robbers. 
And how overcrowded with the Rich 
If jails were a place for loafers. 

O, the lean, pitiful, squalid slums, 

Lees of an accursed vintage; 

Misery drained to the bottom of the vats. 

62 



I have seen the poor, naked, in the city-gutters, 

And the puny children making a brook 

Of the dirty water, 

In play too pathetical. 

Grasping at childhood, which fluttered by 

Like a grey moth and escaped them. 

I thought of all free things: the large sky, 

And the rivers which carry the sky 

Under the whispering willows; 

Rivulets fretting their way down the hillside 

Through the roots of the silver-stemmed alders; 

Clouds voyaging on unknown adventure; 

Winds dancing with tall grasses; 

Little chipmunks, dragon-flies and wrens. 

But I saw only gaunt ghosts 

In the slums of the cities. 

I smelled the stench of Poverty. 

My heart is heavy when I think of those who hunger 

And can never reach the brown, wet laps of April fields; 

The streaming breasts of the Mother; 

Billowy seas of October harvest 

Rippling to the frolic of the wind; 

Trees coo x uetting with the jewelry of new buds, 

Delicately arranging them, 

As a princess decks herself with emeralds, 

Smiling sedately; 

Fruit-trees, heavy with plundering, 

Young warriors, laden with the loot of cities. 

As a mother at evening calls to her children, 

"Come," 

So Earth calls to every one of her offspring, 

"Come unto me. I will feed you all. 

"Not one of you shall lie down hungry." 

What to me is the whisper of the Forest, 

63 



Or the tinkling wheel in the blackbird's throat, 
And all the benediction of the valleys, 
While thousands lay themselves wearily 
On the altar stones of the city? 

Cities, Omnipotent, Songful, Luxurious; 

Queens loaded with jewels, seated on thrones 

Under plumy canopies. 

Monsters, powerful, restless, sinuous; 

Terrifying, vague, vast, mysterious; 

Mystic, relentless, beautiful, but not yet beautiful; 

Lying upon carrion, as a sleek and glossy lion; 

Roaring, muttering, sullenly growling; 

Devouring their prey under the stars, indifferent. 

XXXV. 

Blessed is leisure, gateway 

To the garden of the soul. 

The ponderous machines should unlock 

Those gates, giant ifrits; 

But they stand as dragons before them, 

Destroying those who would enter. 

They snatch their servers into slavery. 

They usurp the cunning hand, 

And bastardize the Soul. 

Can a machine conceive beauty, 

Or has a machine imagination? 

Each seed voyages down the Ages, 
A winged messenger of Time ; 
From the polished, ruddy chestnut, 
Ever the wide-spreading chestnut-tree; 
And from the brown smoke of the puff-ball 
Pearls along the morning path, 

64 



Amid the diamonds threaded on 

The moon-woven gossamer 

Hung by the lowly spiders. 

The airy fabric of the dreamers 

Outlasts the bridges of iron 

And Imagination whirls the soul 

From the uttermost depths of the sea 

To the high caravan of stars. 

It rides upon the wings of Morning 

And wrestles with the lightning; 

Giving communion with the skies by day and by night; 

And, like an invisible sylph, 

Converses with trees and rivers, 

Flowers and the reticent grasses. 

It makes the soul one with those who wring 

Their hands, weeping, 

And one with the company 

Who dance to music. 

By Imagination, Man takes the hands 

Of the gods who look afar, 

Seeing the things which are not, 

And the things which are not 

Become more eternal than the things which are. 

XXXVI. 

Nature works not with violence 

The changes of the hours, 

Nor the revolution of the years. 

Patiently the buds peep forth, 

And noiselessly the seasons steal away; 

Nevertheless, the lightning and the earthquake 

Do their appointed work. 

Winter spares not the outworn tree, 

And the Tempest swings its flail. 

65 



The old to die that the young may live. 
Rebellion, the outcry of the God in Man. 
You die willingly for your Rulers. 
Are you not willing to die for your own souls? 
The blood of Martyrs is a rich fertilizer; 
It will make lilies bloom amid stones, 
Even in the streets of the city. 

XXXVII. 

The feet of Dawn are before the gates 

Of the mountains. 

The East is listening; 

And the joyful lark salutes his footsteps. 

On the tip of a sage-brush a warbler prays, 

Undismayed in the bigness, 

Nor oppressed by the great solitude; 

A little acolyte, in grey robes, 

Topping the world with song. 

He, too, salutes the Golden One, 

Who casts off suddenly his diaphanous mantle 

And, tossing high in air his necklace of jewels, 

Fills the sky with golden banners, 

And shoots his fiery arrows to the zenith. 

He sets the Universe ablaze. 

The world is melted in a golden crucible. 

The Sky cries out in ecstasy, 

"The Sun has come. 

"The Sun. The Sun." 

XXXVIII. 

The Desert murmurs. 

Larks are telling their rosaries; 

Magpies calling their matins, 

And finches in the wild-rose thicket 

66 



Recite their orisons. 

Brooks commune with their pebbled floors, 

Tricking the May-flies to a gauzy dance, 

And warbling to mouth-dripping kine 

A song of pastures, 

Of minty beds and purple bergamot. 

I will go where the little rivers 

Are calling almost impatiently, 

"Lie down by our hurrying. 

"Rest ye beside us. 

"Let us whisper to you out of Eternity, 

"Soothing your ears with our legends. 

"You are for a moment, but we are forever. 

"Chattering, laughing, brawling, 

"Intoning our invocation. 

"We are of the Past and of the Future. 

"You creep back into earth and are gone; 

"But we will soothe the ears of your children forever." 

My ears are awake to the music of the morning. 

I hear the pied yellowhammer 

Beat his drum to drowsy Summer. 

Little wrens ramble in the hedge, restlessly, 

Making a gay noise, chirping and twittering. 

From somewhere the voice of a white-crowned sparrow. 

Further off, near the irrigation-ditch, 

On the top of a poplar, Morning's gold candle, 

An oriole empties his heart. 

The crickets chirp where, 

Faint from the heat, are the reapers; 

And the pouch-cheeked chipmunk 

Runs swiftly on the fence-rail, 

Escaping from the wheat-field, 

A thief for bread. 

Nature loves the thieves who steal for bread. 

67 



I joy in the sorceries of the dark chambers 

Where the daffodils are begotten. 

But O, the Oppressed of the world 

Who are blighted in darker chambers. 

There is no stir in their blood 

Because the earth is new-born. 

No joy in the coming of grass, 

Nor delight in the glee of the flowers, 

Glad of their resurrection. 

They are ignorant of the tang 

Of damp, delicious, new- plowed fields; 

Hear not the morning-song of birds, 

Happy priestlings of the Dawn, 

Nor ever track the sweeping circle 

Of Earth's beautiful parade. 

They catch no message from clouds; 

Nor feel the silent confidences of the stars. 

For them no fellowship with wayside grass, 

No soothing, sibilant soliloquies of leaves, 

No leafy laughter. 

XXXIX. 

POET: 
O, Truth, when comes the new day? 

TRUTH: 
Who can say of the Dawn, 
"It is here"? 

POET: 
The worshipers of the God of Gold cry, 
"Do not hawks devour thrushes ?" 

TRUTH: 
The song of the thrush is sweeter. 
It is remembered. 

68 



POET: 

They say arrogantly: "Shall we not triumph 
"In the strength which is ours?" 

TRUTH: 
Their strength is the Law. 

The little robbers rob because of their necessity. 
They are outlaws; 

But the greater because of plunder made lawful. 
They are respectable. 

POET: 

To be respectable is to be contemptible. 

Let none ever say of me, "He was respectable. ,, 

The train-robber, the highwayman, 

All those who boldly take and boldy kill, 

Are kin to Drake, Raleigh, Cortez, Caesar. 

But the fat-paunched robbers, 

From the safety of their leathern chairs, 

Steal from the laborer his sweat, 

Harness baby-fingers to toil for milk, 

Till pitying Death opens the gate 

Which leads to grass and flowers. 

TRUTH: 
The grass and flowers they never saw. 

POET: 

I will preach justice till the end of my days. 
Who shall redeem the people? 

TRUTH: 
None can save a people, only themselves. 
"^Vords live in acts. 
Deamers exalt, but Doers 
Water the exaltation with their blood. 

69 



POET: 

Consenting chattels. 
Will they never dare? 

TRUTH: 
Dare to be yourself. 

POET: 
The path so steep and Pity persuades aside. 

TRUTH: 
Be pitiless unto greater things. 
Shall the large design lack your love? 

POET: 

Yea, I must prune that there may be fruit. 

I must dare to suffer 

And to make others suffer, 

Even those I love, 

That the great purpose be not thwarted. 

Nature's extremest care, 

That I be myself. 

If I surrender myself to another even for pity 

I have thwarted the purpose. 

Life is myself 

And greater than myself; 

And I am Life. 

TRUTH: 
Unless you are remorselessly yourself, 
You are a dwarfed 
And stunted thing, 
Wanderer in a desert, 
Running about in a lost circle, 
Cheated by the things which are not. 

70 



POET: 
Out of the silence I hear a whisper. 
It thrills me and enfolds me, 
Like the cool night wind 
Which passes over the desert 
After the heat of the day. 

I see a vision taller and brighter than the mirage: 
A multitude with palms and swords, lyres and songs; 
Above them an angel, whose face I cannot see. 

TRUTH: 
Have you that vision? 
If but one see it, it will come. 
O, Poet, let your living be its sacrament, 
And your dying like the planting of lilies, 
So that your dust shall bloom again, 
Giving blossoms sweeter than yourself. 

XL. 

I know that Nature is part of Eternity, 

And I, a part of Nature. 

I know that I am one with Beauty, 

And my brother is one. 

All are Nature's experiments 

Toward a harmony. 

We sound our tone 

In the everlasting tune; 

Oaks and mosses, thrushes and tree-toads, 

Man and the cunningly designed insects, 

Little hidden musicians we never see, 

Winds and seas and running waters, 

Skies and the assemblage of distant worlds. 

Nature has given me to dive into 

The depths of the sky; 

7i 



To catch the pulsing tread of the stars 

When, through their bright recessional, 

We commune together. 

I know that life endures no longer than 

The breaking of a bubble, 

Yet I have made it bitter for my brothers, 

And they have made it bitter for me. 

I understand the gossip of trees in Summer; 

The adoration of birds, 

And the acquiescence of insects. 

Wind and Sea speak to me. 

Their interrogation is one. 

The low-muttered music of the rivers 

Sounds to me as if the forgotten dead 

Were striving to talk to the living; 

Dumbly, yet happily, murmuring in sobbing cadences 

The universal unity. 

One with each other and with the crystals 

Threaded on the twigs after rain; 

The spear of grass tipped with dew, 

And the ant which climbs the blade 

To sip at the fleeting fountain. 

One with the bright-winged butterfly 

New-lighted on a rose, 

Slowly waving its wings of marvel. 

One with the fragrant peach which indolently sways 

On its cradling stem amid the lance-headed 

Peach-leaves, seducing the air 

With aromatic passion. 

One with the rains which move so stately 

Out of the hills and march across the valleys, 

Benevolent invaders; 

Or the snow of perfect whiteness, 

Covering and protecting; 

Like a fond nurse above her sleeping babe, 

72 



Saying, "Hush." 

One with the grass, whose gentle fingers 

Weave so gracious a coverlet for our repose. 

The mountains, which stand afar off, 

And the great forests, 

Sanctuaries of the gods, solemn and silent; 

Where the Centuries are sleeping. 

They are part of me as I of them. 

It is good to believe that I and all of these 

Are of a unity with the white sheep, 

Bleating soft and querulous upon the hillside; 

The thunder-voiced kine in the green meadows, 

Standing knee-deep in the marshes; 

My loving dog who regards me insistently 

With faithful eyes ; and the soft-furred cat 

Whirring the mysterious wheel of its content 

Upon my shoulder. 

It is good to lie beneath the stars and hear 

The small voices 

Nearer to me than the stars and dearer. 

I know that I am one with these, and more, 

And my brothers are one with them, and more; 

And these, and more, are one with me and my brothers. 

We are an universal whole. 

XLI. 

The beauty of orchards is mine. 

Orchards drooping heavy, 

Lovely ladies pregnant, expectant. 

Giant spruce-trees, monarchs of the years, 

Which have seized the Earth with their 

Compelling roots, as a lover seizes 

His beloved, and have wrought a green canopy. 

The grey oaks, populous cities, 

73 



With ants, squirrels, owls and hawks 

For citizens. 

Balsamed and odorous pines which catch the breeze, 

Holding it for a moment as satyrs hold nymphs; 

Kissing it, releasing it, stamped with sweet odor. 

Bright rivers and their veins, the irrigation-ditches, 

Which stretch silver fingers into the Desert, 

And beckon tall poplars to stand beside them 

As sentinels, 

Patiently waiting for the King to come. 

The wonderful Mother is everlasting, 

Beautiful in every part; 

The lesser as well as the greater. 

The pebbles of the brook are jewels ; 

The mountains emerald and amethyst, 

Opal and sapphire; 

The wilderness of flowers a gorget 

From the Sun God's throat. 

Beauty is not wasted though it endure 

But an hour: 

The heavenly fires, which shall remain 

When Earth has ceased; 

And blossoms which bloom for a moment 

That there may be fruit. 

The flames of Night are eternal. 

Who beheld their lighting, or who shall see 

Their fire grow dim? 

Nevertheless, they will vanish, 

Even as the flowers vanish. 

The loveliness of flowers, 

Eternal as the loveliness of the sky. 

I have sought to commune with the stars, 

But they will not answer. 

Yet they seem to me not so eternal as I, myself, 

And not so beautiful as my own longings. 

74 



The infinite Mystery has begotten us both; 

Indolently; negligently. 

We are no more than the kelp or the starfish. 

With the moth and the gnat we are equal. 

Man is but a part, 

Yet unto himself he is the whole. 

He fulfills his destiny not at all, 

Except as he follows the inscrutable Mystery 

Which has begotten him. 

XLII. 

How rich is our palace of Light. 

Not only the over-arching skies, 

The wide-spreading sea 

And the engirdling mountains, 

The Desert and towering clouds; 

But the carefully painted wildcat, 

The striped skunk, the spotted fawn, 

Kittens and puppies, 

All soft, helpless young things, 

Butterflies, winged-flowers, 

And humming-birds, jewels of the air, 

Green beetles, with emerald backs ; 

Coral lady-bugs, enameled with black spots ; 

Carefully touched by the artist. 

The pigeon's neck, the pheasant's breast; 

The jay-bird's wing; the blackbird's back; 

The royal spreading peacock; 

A baby's foot, 

Pink as the shells which have caught the dye 

Of sunset; 

Corals and seaweeds, 

Fishes fantastic, 

Which swam through a rainbow; 

75 



Steaming, new-plowed fields and the dark loam of the forest; 

Leaves, blossoms, flowers, skies and cobwebs; 

The illimitable Evening and Morning, 

And, also, the illimitable diamonds 

Which the sparkling fingers of the Frost 

Hang upon wintry boughs. 

The Universe as much within a frost-crystal 

As in the constellations which cover the night 

With their patterns. 

XLIII. 

To inventory the abundance of Nature to the poor 

Is to sparkle water before the eyes of those 

Dying of thirst in the desert. 

The kindly fields are bountiful 

As the breasts of a mother. 

Wheat-fields, golden, and oat-fields, silvern; 

Fields of bearded barley, a phalanx of warriors 

Moving forward. 

The tall rye which waves in the Summer wind, 

Billows of plenty. 

Fields of bannered maize, rustling their ribbons; 

An army of plumed captains, proud in their bravery. 

Generous grain-fields of every sort, 

Stately women, flushed of the sun, 

Their hair blown by the wind, 

Swaying, undulant, bearing golden vessels, 

Full and overflowing. 

Does a mother bear a child 

And have no milk in her breasts? 

Consider, also, the rewarding orchards, 

Bearing rich burden and incense; 

White brides, 

Serene in the prophecy of fruit. 

76 



Royal companies of plums, pears, 

Apples, cherries and apricots ; 

Ranks of nectarines, oranges, lemons, figs; 

Luscious peaches, with sun-burned cheeks, 

Blushing maidens who look modestly down; 

Peach-orchards perfuming the September breeze. 

How aromatic are crushed peach-leaves in the hand. 

Nut-trees, 

Walnuts and wide-spreading chestnuts, 

Casting heavy shade in mid-summer. 

Almonds, cousins to peach-trees, 

Both from Persia, the country of Omar, Sadi, 

Hafiz, and Firdausi. 

Green almonds, white and sweet as milk. 

Almond-leaves withering with a sweet spice; 

Tall pecans in rich river-bottoms. 

Hickory-trees with shining, pungent leaves, 

Plates of gold in October. 

Vineyards, arbored and festooned, 

Where the wild doves crouch upon the ground 

In the shade of the vines ; 

Ruby, amber and purple bunches, 

Sweet and nectared, filling the air 

With delicate musk. 

Vineyards in serried ranks on the steep hillsides, 

Sloping toward the South; 

The grotesque, gnarled and twisted vines, 

Crooked gnomes, 

Bringing wine from Earth's cool cavern 

To gladden the heart of man. 

Does a mother bear children 
And refuse to suckle them? 
Or, having children, does she fail 
To fold them to her bosom? 

77 



Not only the fields which laugh to us, 

But also the gardens, which are exquisite : 

Red beets, with purple leaves, blood-veined; 

Golden carrots, with green plumes; 

Lettuces which caught pink Aphrodite when she fell; 

Burly cabbages, blue-green, silvered with a frost 

Winter has forgotten. 

Groping beans, which quickly clamber to the top; 

Those ropes by which the very valiant Jack 

Climbed from earth to clouds, 

As so would I. 

White-blossom peas, and the young peas, 

Sugary in their cradle-pod. 

Tomato-vines, hung with scarlet fruit, 

Pink-stemmed pie-plant, voluptuous-leaved; 

And all the countless gifts born 

In the dark, mysterious earth: 

Potatoes, turnips, onions and the parsnip 

Which once was the deadly hemlock 

That slew Socrates. 

No, not hemlock slew him, 

But the men he would have saved. 

Now it has become wholesome; 

The poison of yesterday, the food of tomorrow. 

Artichokes, triumphant silvery thistles, 

Called from the wayside and made royal. 

Stout, up-pushing asparagus, 

Challenging March with spears, 

And wooing August with feathery fronds. 

The purple egg-plant from Arabia, 

And luscious melons from the Persians; 

Melons of Nusrabad and Casaba. 

Water-melons, chrysoprase-casks of nectar. 

Marvelous to be filled through so small a pipe. 

Broad-leaved squashes, 

78 



Summoning Summer through golden trumpets, 
And feeling the world with suspicious fingers. 
Pumpkins, giant apples of Hesperides, 
Big with promise of Winter sweets. 

Consider, too, the lowly grasses 

Which feed the flocks upon the hills, 

Pouring loaves exhaustlessly from the valleys; 

And those cunning chemists, all the clover-tribe, 

Lading the air of June, 

Distilling honey for the bees, 

And from the air recovering to unwearied Earth 

Her nitrogen. 

Cycle of fertility complete. 

Is there any flaw in Nature, 

Or any wart upon her excellence? 

I know not at what time, 

For Nature regards not the clock of the heavens 

And keeps no calendar; 

But I know she will not construct this beauty 

And endure Man's ugliness. 

She will not scatter out of her treasure-house 

This plenty and endure that Man 

Should plunder his brother; 

Shall her child destroy her house of eternity? 

Or shall he pass into oblivion and her palace 

Of ecstasy remain? 

XLIV. 

I sought God in the caverns of the Ages, 

But they were empty. 

I pushed aside the tapestries of Night 

And tore down rudely 

The star-sown arras of the Years, 

79 



Yet found only desolation. 

I loosed my soul upon the backward path 

But it was lost in the mists, 

And I was frightened by the silence. 

I stood upon the peaks of Thought 

And tried to pierce the clouds of Being, 

But was dizzy with the infinite. 

I called into impenetrable vacancy, 

And was not answered. 

I heard no voice. 

I saw no hand ; no face. 

My soul rent the veil before the sanctuary of the clouds 

And rushed in with the rebellious lightning ; 

But there was nothing. 

I shod my spirit with the winged slippers of the Wind, 

And pried curiously into every corner. 

All was emptiness and a great stillness. 

I seized the Sun by his burning tresses 

And questioned him, 

But he was without knowledge. 

I clung to the chariot-wheels of the Stars, 

But was flung back to earth, and they passed on. 

Then I knew there is no God. 

I, myself, am God and a maker of gods. 

To be myself, the only godhood. 

To bud, to bloom, to fruit, and from the fruit 

New growth. 

To express myself fully, absolutely, cruelly, 

Or I am a dead thing. 

To be myself, or I prevent God-birth. 

Existence, the supreme godhood. 

Unless I am determinedly myself, 

I have taken the great gift and belied it. 

I have broken the everlasting chain. 

80 



I am a link that has failed. 

I will not weary the stars with prayers, 

But will fill the world with myself, 

Even as the air encompasses the Whole, 

And the fragrance of lilacs pervades the night. 

I will not taint the air with incense, 

But will go to the flowers and say: 

"Brothers, I, too, insist on my own quality, 

"Even though it seems not sweet to others." 

The skunk-cabbage, golden and hopeful 

In the woody swamp, 

Refuses not its life because its odor 

Is not applauded. 

And betrays not its part 

Because I do not approve. 

Why should I, with fear-shaken hands, 

Supplicate the clouds, 

Or grovel, face-downward, in the grass, 

Who am myself the clouds, and more; 

The grass, and more; 

God, and more? 

Offspring of Nature, the supremest God, 

Myself, for myself her supremest part, 

Wresting from her my own god-head, 

And interpreting to her the God which is to be , 

Yet I am not greater than others. 

What is it to me that Nature also 

Must pass down the endless channel? 

For me, my own life is eternity; 

Though it be a short race between two pillars, 

Nevertheless, it is for me 

The beginning and the end of Time. 

Man continually evolving, 

Eager, thirsting, changing, curious; 

Restlessly studying his soul. 

81 



Man to himself sufficient; 
Exclusive, absorbing, complete; 
All-important; a maker of gods; 
And I a worker in the toy-shop, 
Seriously insisting that my toy also 
Be gilded and appraised. 
By chance it, too, may be a god. 

The stars have mocked me, 

But I have laughed back at them. 

What, because your lives are longer, 

Your beards are flame 

And your graves the exultant ether, 

Shall you mock me? 

Is not an end the end? 

Is not a life, life? 

Why do you not cover your scintillating brows 

And petulantly cast yourselves into the infinite abyss, 

Because you, too, will come at last into 

The vault of darkness? 

Do you not, nevertheless, drive the fiery wheels 

Of your wagons their appointed race? 

And the butterfly, so carefully painted, 

Daintily decorated with infinite solicitude, 

Does it refuse to blossom upon the air 

Because its destiny is but an hour? 

If its hour be sunny and it luxuriate 

In the heart of a hollyhock, 

Or if its hour be rainy and it lies broken 

In the roots of the grass, 

Nevertheless, it has lived, 

And in the daintily-woven 

Chrysalis of its caterpillar 

Will carefully hand on to the coming Summer 

The glad embroidery of its wings. 

82 



Shall I despairingly cast myself face downward 

Among the fallen leaves and cry out, 

"It is vain. It is vain"? 

Shall I betray Life because, like the leaves, 

I shall, with allotted brevity, return to my duty? 

Are not they beautiful in death? 

They have expressed themselves; 

They have done their part. 

Death, the infinite sea, 

Which in its widest sweep 

Touches the shore of Life. 

Does the sunset withhold its glory 

Because Night advances to swallow it? 

Or Night stay its wonder because 

It will pale to a new day? 

Shall Spring tear off her garlands 

And deny the overture of birds 

Because Summer comes quickly? 

Or Summer lie by the brook and sigh 

Because presently she dies? 

Or Autumn, like a sour churl, refuse his fruits 

Because Winter has a sword at his throat? 

Nay, because of Winter, he urges his abundance, 

And busily tramples the grapes in the wine-press. 

He is more prodigal of gifts because 

Soon comes barrenness. 

Death is Life in its immensity. 

Shall I be rebellious because I make way for the new? 

I am not the Whole, but a part of the Whole. 

There are stars beyond counting 

Which, with far solicitude, overhang the Night. 

There are many blades of grass 

Which nurse lowly upon the earth. 

83 



Each is of the Whole and assumes not to say, 

"Behold me! I am the only one." 

Yet each is determined desperately to be itself, 

As if there were none other. 

Relentlessly itself; that through it 

The indefinite Past and the indefinite Future 

May be united. 

If I be not ruthlessly myself, 

I have despised the wonderful Past which made me, 

And have betrayed the imprisoned Future 

Which holds up to me imploring hands. 

If I suffer not my brother to be himself, 

I have torn the scarfs embroidered by 

The fingers of the Stars, 

And invaded the cloisters of the Ages in vain. 

I will not shroud my soul in despair 

And wail piteously because I must stand alone 

Before the doors of Oblivion 

And enter reluctantly, without guide 

And without companion. 

Why should I whine, like a frightened dog 

Lost from its master? 

I know that I, too, am a sentinel 

Imperious as Orion, 

Set upon a celestial watch; 

Sending my thoughts out to the Pleiades 

Feeling the breath of the Archer; 

A sentinel, pacing the star-built battlements 

Of Eternity, 

Charged with obligation to the dead 

And those to come. 

I will be honorably relieved from my guard 

When the burden of the night is heavy 

And the Morning Star pales in the East. 

84 



I pushed aside the curtains of the Universe 

And looked in, and there, 

In a great loneliness, never to be broken, 

Brooded my soul. 

I said to myself, "I will carve god-hood 

"Out of manhood. 

"I will carve God out of myself." 

XLV. 

Behold how Nature in her elusive mantle, 

More hushed than Night, 

Soft-trailing as the clouds, 

Goes, like a mother, to her perfect work. 

Gentle as Sleep, 

More comforting than Death, 

She lifts the sea unto the mountain-top 

Without a sound, 

And pours continually the everlasting urns. 

The rivers murmur as gods that dream, 

And the benignant mountains guard their slumber. 

Their heads are pillowed on Eternity; 

Their never-sleeping voices are soothing. 

Consider, also, the rain, 

The very wine of days; 

How noiselessly it seeks the slender roots, 

As a bride creeps to her love; 

And who has ever heard a cry or noise 

From the frail and thready roots 

Which uplift the trees, 

Garnish the earth with grass 

And spread abroad the blazonry of flowers? 

The frail roots whose delicate fingers distill 

Earth's miracle of nectared fruits, 

And never make a sound. 

Nature has laid her finger on her lips. 

Night and day she teaches that Beauty is her state, 

Silence her delight, 

85 



And Freedom her condition. 

After Man has shouted his cries 

And fretted the air with his clamor, 

Lo, he lies down, also, to the great Silence, 

And is gathered up again by the patient roots 

Into larger beauty. 

XLVI. 

Sorrow is beloved of the eternities. 

Her watch-tower is a pinnacle of the mountains. 

She descends to the hut of the fisherman, 

Nestled in the rocks, 

Just beyond the edge of foam. 

She seeks, also, the palace 

Of him who has built proudly on a hill. 

Her eyes are sad as the Moon when it has fallen; 

Her lips firm as the lips of a wrestler. 

She is the great Sculptor, fashioning the soul. 

The stroking of her hand is strength. 

She models us to beauty. 

Knowledge nestles between her knees, 

As a child between the knees of his mother. 

She has come to me and lifted me up. 

She would not comfort me, but she lifted me up. 

She led me down, also, into purple depths, 

Whence, turning suddenly, I saw 

The heights, touched with sunrise. 

She shielded me in shadow. 

She leads Death by the hand, 

The dark, oblivious solitude 

From which the soul shrinks in affright. 

Sorrow is the strength of the world; 

Death but a pause in the great harmony, 

Chanted upon the silver strings of the stars. 

Death, the eternal sorrow; 

Sorrow, the eternal aggrandizer. 

86 



XLVII. 

Death, keeper of Time's portal, 

Warder of the cloudy gate, 

Doorway to Eternity; 

The slow-turning ages are its hinges. 

The Sun is its watchman, 

The stars are its warders. 

The perfect portal to the path endless, 

Through which comes the Future, 

Bearing on her strong right arm a baby, laughing. 

Death, master of the gateway, 

Holds a crystal cup, dripping rainbows. 

Benevolent Death; chaste; just; not to be feared; 

Keeper of the Halls of Immortality; 

Whomsoever he leads into the Garden 

Wanders not abroad any more. 

His daughter is Memory, 

Guardian of the Chamber of Sacred Silences 

Where no air from the world stirs; 

Nor is any change. 

Life is a look into a beautiful valley 

Through a narrow casement; 

Then Death, like a kindly seneschal, 

Closes the window. 

Death ever present, ever feared; never accepted; 

Terminator of joys and separator of companions. 

If Life be lived without reserve or denial, 

Then* Death is the perfection of Life, 

And Life the perfection of Death: 

A silent friend who leads us to rest, 

As at evening a little child is called home 

By its mother to the dreamless sleep. 



87 



0, who should fear an unmolested sleep, 
Where the wind runs through the grass, 
And the flowers softly bow their heads 

In melancholy contemplation of their own loveliness? 

Shall I understand that the Sun must die, 

Yet speak of immortality? 

Nevertheless, Man has his immortality, 

As the seed of grass. 

If you would but let her, how tenderly 

Would Nature withdraw each one of you 

Toward her Chamber of Silence. 

Death, universal and impenetrable terror, 

Beautiful as Birth; harmony inseparable; 

Awful majesty. 

I await you. I salute you. 

Your face is inscrutable, 

But you are a goodly messenger. 

I know you hold open the portal. 

Through you, O, inexorable and compelling one, 

1, too, shall salute the Future. 

XLVIII. 

Between the two immensities, under the infinite arch, 

Death seems only a deeper note in the eternal song. 

The death of Man not more than the death of this 

Little horned-toad whose dry husk I toss 

With my foot. 

Here lie empty shells of cows, 

Withered in the sun; 

Skulls and ribs of horses; 

A pile of stones above a grave. 



88 



To Man, dead bones are sacred, 

Though not the living flesh. 

Even the toiler, dead, is respected for a moment. 

I have stood by the death-bed of mothers. 

I have watched the mysterious veil 

Fall over the face of a child. 

I have seen strong men shot in battle 

And in the brawl of mining-camps, 

In gambling-rooms and on the street; 

Brave men and cowards; 

Yet never have I seen the invisible Sculptor 

Fail to mould dignity and confer peace 

Of the same passionless bigness as the stars. 

I have stood with soldiers, 

Face to face with the unseen Captain, 

And have wrapped the dead in their blankets 

For the long slumber. 

The Dawn was our celebrant; 

The larks our choir, 

And the mists of Morning, incense. 

Simply, as the fall of a tree, 

These returned to the Mother. 

The wild men of the wilderness 

Take Death by the hand, 

As they take Life by the hand; 

Without mouthing, or vain conceit. 

They chant their sorrow a little while, 

Drumming upon the hollow-sounding parchment; 

Then they pile stones above the sleeper, 

And pass into the secret places of the Desert. 

Can we not, also, partake of Death's dignity 

And let our husks fall in primal simplicity? 

89 



What of fire, firstling of Creation? 

Type of the soul; 

The great purifier; 

Not devouring, but transmuting. 

So that with remembering hands we may scatter 

The loved ashes upon a spot of our communion, 

Giving them to the swift-running heralds of the air, 

XLIX. 

I have lived with my brown brothers 

Of the wilderness, 

And found them a mystery. 

The cunning of the swift-starting trout 

A mystery, also; 

The wisdom of voyaging birds; 

The gophers' winter-sleep. 

The knowledge of the bees. 

All a mystery. 

I have lain out with the brown men 

And know they are favored. 

Nature whispered to them her secrets, 

But passed me by. 

They instructed my civilization. 

Stately and full of wisdom 

Was Hin-mah-too-yah-Laht-Kt; 

Thunder rolling in the mountains; 

Joseph, Chief of the Nez-Perces; 

Who in five battles from the Clearwater 

To Bear Paw Mountains, 

Made bloody protest against Perfidy and Power. 

Ah-laht-ma-kaht, his brother, 

Who led the young men in battle; 

Tsootlem-mox-mox, Yellow Bull; 

Cunning White Bird, a brown Odysseus, 

90 



And indomitable Too-hul-hul-soot, 

High Priest, dignified; unafraid; inspired; 

Standing half-naked in the Council Teepee, 

Insisting in low musical gutturals, 

With graceful gesture, 

"The Earth is our Mother. 

"From her we come; 

"To her we return. 

"She belongs to all. 

"She has gathered into her bosom 

"The bones of our ancestors. 

"Their spirits will fight with us 

"When we battle for our home 

"Which is ours from the beginning. 

"Who gave to the White Man 

"Ownership of the Earth, 

"Or what is his authority 

"From the Great Spirit 

"To tear babes from the nursing breast? 

"It is contemptible to have much where others want." 

And squat, slit-eyed Smokhallah, 

Shaman of the Wenatchies, and Chelans, 

Half-draped in a red blanket, 

Haranguing his people to die 

In brave fight on the bosom 

Of the Mother who bore them. 

Wily Sulk-tash-kosha, the Half Sun, 

Chieftain, persuading submission. 

"The White Men are more abundant 

"Than the grass in the Springtime. 

"They are without end and beyond number/' 

Where are those many-colored cyclones 

Of painted and feathered horses 

With naked riders, wearing eagle-feathers, 

9i 



Brandishing rifles, bows and lynx-skin quivers, 
Gleaming through the yellow dust-cloud, 
Galloping, circling, hallooing, whooping, 
To the War Council? 



Just over there where yon purple peak, 

Like a great amethyst, gems the brow of the Desert, 

I sprawled flat in the bunch-grass, a target 

For the just bullets of my brown brothers betrayed. 

I was a soldier, and, at command, 

Had gone out to kill and be killed. 

This was not majestic. 

The little grey gophers 

Sat erect and laughed at me. 

In that silent hour before the dawn, 

When Nature drowses for a moment, 

We swept like fire over the smoke-browned tee-pees; 

Their conical tops peering above the willows. 

We frightened the air with crackle of rifles, 

Women's shrieks, children's screams, 

Shrill yells of savages; 

Curses of Christians. 

The rifles chuckled continually. 

A poor people who asked nothing but freedom, 

Butchered in the dark. 

The dawn would not linger, 

Nor the slow-advancing day refuse to come. 

The larks saluted the morn 

As if there had been no murder. 

In the accusing light of the remorseless Sun 

It was not good to see brown boys and girls 

Scattered about the grass in Death's repose; 

On their sides, in reckless weariness. 

92 



On their backs, arms sprawled out carelessly, 

Or drawn over their eyes, as if to shut out the light. 

Nor pleasant to see the fearful gate-way 

In the just-budding maiden-bosom, 

Whence startled Life had leaped to search the void. 

Chubby babies, with a blue bullet-hole 

In the innocent breast, the soft little belly. 

And mothers whose bosoms ran blood with the milk. 

They lay quiet in great dignity; 

Their eyes staring at us indifferent; 

Almost contemptuous. 

LI. 

The Black Angel is riding. 

Furiously he rides on the fore-front of a tempest 

Which licks up the blossomry of the World 

And blows it away like dust. 

The plumed fields are laid low, 

Lovely corn-flowers in the midst; 

And the wings of his coursers 

Overwhelm the zenith. 

The whistle of their pinions 

Is the screaming of eagles 

Which fly above Tartarus. 

Their manes toss out lightnings 

And flames shoot from their nostrils. 

They paw the air for hunger 

And neigh terribly for drink. 

The river they drink from is red. 

Its banks are hidden by tormenting fogs 
Which are the ghosts of the slain, 
And the winds which blow up and down 
Moan continually the moans of the unborn. 

93 



White lilies are trampled 

And their whiteness mingled with the mire. 

Fragrances of all the slow-maturing years 

Are cut down with a sharp scythe. 

Destruction strides mercilessly, 

Spreading abroad his dark mantle, 

And there is a great stench everywhere. 

I have seen War. 

I have heard it. 

I have smelled it. 

Even now I am waked from dreams 

By the stink of bodies 

Three days dead under the sun. 

Maggots filled their mouths 

And flies crawled over their eyeballs, 

Buzzing up angrily as we threw 

Manhood into the pit of putrefaction. 

Weeds will grow upon the lips of lovers 

And grass flourish out of the hearts of fathers, 

But the father and the lover 

Will return no more. 

Nature will make excellent manure 

Of musicians, artists, artisans, artificers, 

Mechanics, merry-makers, discoverers; 

Poets, makers of soul; 

Sacred receptacles of unspoken dreams. 

I have hugged the grinning skeleton to my bosom 

And called him Honor, but his breath 

Was the air of the charnel-house. 

I have, in my folly, endured 

Burning summer and biting winter; 

Thirst, hunger, fever and the marching of marionettes, 

So that men lay down in the mud 

And puked from exhaustion. 

94 



Incessant rain, the earth become diluvian; 

Men, mud-daubed lizards; 

Body and soul wallowing in primeval beastliness. 

Was this for a great thing? 

The slaughter of Man 

And the enslavement of souls. 

I have heard the screams of innocent, dumb horses, 

Disemboweled; 

And have stopped my ears 

Against the cries of my mangled fellows, 

Begging, for the pity of Christ, that they be shot, 

And their agony ended. 

Emperors, presidents, spinners of diplomacy, 

Have you ever heard the ravings of those 

Who, through the scarlet door of the torture-chamber, 

Reached to clearer vision and died 

Cursing "God," "Country," "Patriotism," 

Words which had betrayed them? 

The peoples set up no boundaries against each other. 

They drink together under pleasant arbors 

The red wine of friendship. 

They harvest from adjoining fields the tasseled gold, 

And call to each other from neighbor-vineyards 

Where doves coo among the vines. 

They sing the old-time songs of good comrades; 

Marrying and intermarrying. 

Suddenly, as lightning fires the dry prairie 

And conflagration roars to the horizon, 

Madness falls upon the peoples. 

They run about killing each other, 

Not knowing why. 

Whose fingers are slipped through 

95 



The collars of the dogs of war, 

Ready to release them? 

Who strike the iron gates 

And let loose the pack, 

Baying: "War. War. War"? 

Do the peasants who plow under the blue sky 

Meet in the kindly fields 

To declare war against each other, 

Or the laborers after their toil 

Sit in their cottages, planning battle? 

Do the miners hasten from their dark 

Communion with the ages 

To slaughter their brothers of other lands? 

Or the slaves of the Titanic forges 

Plot murder against their fellows? 

Who is it orders this hate ; 

This carefully arranged murder? 

Whose is the quarrel? 

Whose the profit? 

The common herd slavishly keep step 

To the time set for them by their Masters, 

And as sheep crowd up the slaughter-chute 

To the butcher's knife, 

They enter the dark cave 

Whence is no return: 

Neither baby-fingers, nor lovers' cheeks ; 

Neither sun, nor moon, nor the ripple of waters; 

Neither seeing, nor hearing; 

Nor thought, nor laughter any more. 

The strange and curious bees are forward to die 

For the hive they have stored. 

Free, winged things, 

None can fence their pastures against them. 

96 



But what share have the toilers 

In the honeycombs they have builded? 

Or what ownership have soldiers in the earth 

They wet with blood? 

For what do the people throw away recklessly 

That mysterious commodity 

Quarried from the depths of Time? 

Jewel to each more precious than all jewels, 

Which the Masters cannot restore. 

The lives of the people, but a little thing 

To the Masters; not so much as the life 

Of the herds and flocks; 

But it is of inestimable worth to the owner. 

Perhaps it is star-dust; or perhaps 

Out of it star-dust may be made. 

O, young men, with dawn behind your eyes 
And Destiny held as a puzzling toy 
Between your strong and nervous hands, 
Why do you crowd forward to the sacrifice? 

They kiss, half negligently, the weeping ones: 

Mothers, wives, sweethearts, babes, 

And say good-bye; a strange seeming in their eyes; 

For ringing in their ears are the songs of the harpies, 

Black from the funnels of Hell, 

Who fly, smoky-plumed, before the battle, 

Screaming the bewildering medicine of their cry. 

Awake ! Awake ! Be not besotted by the shrieks 

Of the filthy ones; nor mistake their screams for songs. 

Awake from your sacrificial drunkenness. 

Go down to the eternal river and wash your eyes clear. 

You bow in servile idolatry to sacred falsities, 

Antique garments stuffed and set upon a pole. 

97 



She whom you follow is a whore, bedizened in tinsel. 

The true Freedom lies with toads 

In a dark dungeon. 

Set her free and lead her into the street 

To be seen of all men, 

Naked and unashamed. 

Make a proclamation through silver trumpets: 

"This is our true Redeemer. 

"And in her realm is no idolatry, 

"Neither of men, nor of flags; 

"Neither of words, nor of songs. 

"She who walks beside her, gaunt and stony-eyed, 

"Is Rebellion, the Mother of the Beautiful One; 

"And she who walks on the other hand is Justice, 

"Daughter of Freedom." 

Say to the Masters, 

"Will you willingly acquiesce when these Three 

"Shall strip from you the robes you have stolen 

"And part them among the naked? 

"Will you be glad when these shall divide 

"Your abundance among those who starve? 

"Will you who have for so long swept the flowers 

"From before the feet of the children, 

"Snatch up trumpets and join in the exultant 

"Psalm v/hich these shall sing, 

"And pluck delightedly 

"The hyacinths which will spring up behind 

"The footsteps of Freedom?" 

Young men who are about to die, 

Stay a moment and take my hand, 

Who am also about to die. 

You have been carefully winnowed and selected 

For the banqueting of the Hooded Skeleton 

Which beckons, but says never a word; 

98 



Leading down into the dark chasm, 

But leading none back forever. 

Tell me, for what? 

Not you alone die, but the children 

Who through you should enter the great pageant, 

Receiving at the hands of the Master of Mystery 

The miraculous wafer which, being eaten, 

Opens the heavens, 

Unlocks the eyes to visions; 

The ears to songs. 

Fathers of the expectant generations, 

Tell me, for what? 

Bird-men of the air, bold, exultant, 

Sweeping the high empyrean; 

Mole-men, burrowing back to savagery, 

Victims stretched upon the snowy altars 

Where Pain relentlessly pushes you down, 

Letting fall a dim curtain between you 

And the radiant world. 

You who see not the faces bending above you, 

Nor shall ever see the eyes of the beloved, 

Nor the face of your child you invite into the world; 

You between whom and the busy world 

The doors have been shut, 

Who never shall hear the April bird-song, 

Or squirrels throwing nuts into the October leaves 

Where the sudden crack of a dry branch 

Startles the woody silences; 

You who, crumpled and twisted, 

Shall be frightful to the rosy-limbed children; 

You who never again shall spurn, 

With light, keen feet the rugged mountain-top, 

The level shore, 

Tell me, for what? 

99 



Shall you and I gather about the arena 
And applaud the gladiators 
Who stain the sands with their blood 
In a game of the Masters? 

Is not Death busy enough? 

None escapes his shaft. 

His muffled feet creep to us all in time. 

Why should we heap him with an unripe load? 

Take War by the throat, young soldier, 

And wring from his blood-frothed lips 

The answer, — Why? 

I climbed to the top of the world 

Where the immutable rocks lay scattered 

As they were hurled that fiery dawn 

When Chaos battled with the old dead gods. 

The distorted pines mutely exhibited to me 

Their struggle, 

And the Earth showed me her ancient scars. 

There I put my question. 

Not to the Rulers of the World, 

But to the Weavers of Destiny, 

Immeasurable Space and Inevitable Time. 

I, too, would be satisfied 
Why the young men must die, 
And for what the maidens, 
Treasure-caskets of the Infinite, 
Must be robbed of the Gift 
Preciously hoarded by the Miser Years. 
Mystery, — forever inscrutable. 
Unanswered; unanswering. 
Wonderful beyond wonder. 

ioo 



Below me the mists curled like dragons 

And twisted their lean fingers for destruction. 

The world stretched as a limitless desert, 

Grey and barren. 

Across it passed hosts and infinite hosts lost in the dust, 

Emerging again, tangled and glittering: 

Charlemagne and Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon; 

The armored elephants of Hannibal 

Trampling the wounded, 

And from the plain of the Dead drifted a ghost-word — 

Glory. 

Pillars of smoke arose, as from a great altar: 

The voices of razed and pillaged cities 

Ascending to the judging heavens, 

And everywhere, as if a strange grass 

Grew in the desert, 

Women lifted their arms in vain. 

The whole earth was walled about by a wall 

Reaching to the sky, 

And on it, in robes of gold, on golden thrones, 

Sat iron-browed men, hawk-visaged men, 

Hog-snouted men, War Makers. 

Obedient to them, some worked an iron hand 

On a great derrick, which reached 

To the compass of the wall. 

It touched the morning-faced youths 

And a trumpeter called aloud: 

"Young men of the Morning, 

"You have lived for us. Now you must die for us." 

If any rebelled, the iron-hand strangled him; 

And one who lay strangled was a stranger. 

On his cap was "Liberty." 

IOI 



Everywhere, like the quick assault of Night, 

War blotted out Love. 

Armies crawled over the land 

As locusts over a green field, 

Leaving it bare. 

Always oppressed serfs swarmed to the quarrels 

Of their oppressors, 

Tearing each others' throats. 

Forever, through the mist, 

I saw mothers kissing their sons 

In a strange silence, 

Remembering the hour they bore them. 

They laid upon a foul altar 

The wages of their agony. 

The woman took up the hoe 

Where the man had dropped it 

And wielded the axe the man had laid down. 

Forever the old women gathered in groups, 

Garrulously sad, talking low, 

Knitting and weaving for those already dead. 

And the maidens with white faces 

And lips salt with tears, 

Led Love to an iron crucifixion. 

They communed alone with relentless Fate, 

Clutching to their bosoms 

The garments of Despair. 

Two streams forever flowed red from two sides 

Toward a dreadful brink 

Where, through thick clouds, 

Two crimson cataracts 

Poured into everlasting Darkness. 

Young men, 

And even more than young men, 

Young women, 

102 



Guardians of the Future, 

Is one man who toils so much better 

Or so much worse than another, 

So much richer or poorer, 

That he must kill his brother? 

Is it just to inscrutable Nature 

Who with infinite pains has brought you 

Down the Path Endless? 

Tell me distinctly for what is the sacrifice? 

I demand that you refuse to be satisfied, 

That you unravel the old shoutings, 

That you peer to the very bottom. 

Draw in your breath delightedly, 

And confidently insist: 

"My life is my Own. 

"A gift from the Ages, 

"And to me precious 

"Beyond estimation. 

"I will deny authority. 

"I will question all things. 

"I will obstinately be informed 

"Whence comes the battle? 

"Whose is the combat?" 

Young men, 

And even more than young men, 

Young women, 

I charge you that in the large solitude 

Where the soul may meditate undisturbed, 

And in the great crowds where souls jostle together, 

Examine all things and refuse to be answered 

Till you are answered of your own souls. 

Come with me — apart — alone, solitary 

As if we trod the darkness of Cosmic Space 

Beyond the stars, where we cannot see each other, 

103 



Soul to soul, naked, 
Tell me for what? 

I saw the Devil at his play-ground 

Leading his legions, who hopped gleefully about 

And danced above a bloody chaos. 

They faced two together who blindly 

Murdered each other, 

While the demons shrieked with laughter. 

They fiddled a mad dance on the exquisite nerves 

And smashed the silver-threaded spine, 

Laughing at the pain-wrung grimaces. 

They made a chorus of the screams of agony 

And sang it to the diapason 

Of the great shells. 

They caught the breath of the dying 

And wove it into a blue mist 

Covering the land. 

They were whimsical. 

They tore off legs and arms, 

Seizing a nose, an eye, a mouth; 

A head here, half a head there; a jaw, 

Leaving the tongue to dangle foolishly 

On the breast, the crazy eyes trying to speak. 

They broke the windows 

Which look out upon the universe. 

They annihilated fatherhood. 

They were obscene. 

A wretch was trying to crawl away 

From his blind agony. And mockingly 

They tethered him with his own bowels. 

The Devil amused himself in his toyshops 
Whittling for his derision. 
Cripples, monstrosities, 

104 



Misshapen burlesques. 

Oddities for his mockery, 

Grotesques for his laughter. 

The carpenters splashed with blood 

Like the butchers of oxen and swine 

Carved feverishly the flesh cheaper than veal. 

Yet its price was the travail of the mothers. 

Even the grass shrank from the screams of torment 

And the sun fled from the sight, 

But the Devil Sang a ribald song, 

And beckoning to the reapers 

He made them like good farmers harvest their crop. 

In the carrion trenches the dead 

Hugged each other as brothers. 

The Devil nudged my elbow and chuckled: 

"How comic are the attitudes of the dead 

"On the field of battle. 

"Absurd gestures and ridiculous contortions, 

"Pantaloons and jesters making satiric pantomime; 

"Whimsical and mocking poses; 

"The dead laughing at their own folly." 

He showed me an idiot wandering over a battlefield 

And muttering, "I was too good for this. They saved me." 

And he kicked the moon-pale faces of the dead, 

Saying 

"Wake up. The Masters call you. 

"Do you not hear? The Masters call you. 

"What! Will you not wake up 

"Even when the Masters want you? 

"You were ready enough to go to sleep for them 

"But you will not wake up for them. 

"O ho! you cunning rascals, I know: 

"You refuse to be put to work again. 

105 



"You are too comfortable; 

"You will cheat the Masters. 

"You insist upon rest." 

He took the noble head o£ a poet 

Between his hands and shook it, 

And laughed and screamed till the buzzards 

Flew away, frightened from their orgy, 

And sat on filthy perches jealously watching 

The fodder thrown out for them by the Masters. 

A young girl caressed the face of a dead woman 

And whispered with white lips, 

"Were you, too, ravished? 

"But you will not have to bear the child." 

The Devil held high festival. 

Rockets, torches, fireworks; his celebration 

Of the triumph of Man's Intellect. 

The titan shells which from afar rend the earth 

And from their fiery volcanoes 

Scatter the bloody gobbets of what were men 

As a water spaniel shakes muddy drops 

From his coat — wasted fragments 

Of Nature's delicately spun, 

Curiously balanced mysteries, 

Each with his own destiny, none duplicates, 

Never to be duplicated. 

The soul of Man shattered contemptuously 

By the brute in Man; 

Man's contemplative godhood smeared 

With his own filth. 

The Devil twisted his tail into a prayerbook 
And hung about him shrouds for robes 
And intoned with uprolled eyes: 

106 



"Jesus who was slain, spin the bullets 

"Hot upon their errand to be cooled in flesh. 

"Guide the monster shells which scream in ecstasy 

"That their waiting is ended and they are released 

"For their feeding. 

"Saviour of mankind, give each of us 

"The greater strength to make the most orphans. 

"To hate our brothers. 

"To murder men. 

"To rape women, 

"To starve children. 

"Thine be the glory, 

"Amen, Amen." 

The Devil hugged his tail to his bosom 

And shouted with laughter. 

I saw two— enemies. 

Did not the Masters say so? 

Their blood had run together 

And was of one redness, 

Minging beyond distinction. 

Their hands reached toward each other, 

Almost touching, 

I saw other two. 

A boy — his white face, beautiful as a girl's, 

And on his forehead, caressing 

The long black hair as might his mother, 

Lay the hand of his enemy. 

For the boy, a mother waits. 

For the other, a woman, 

His baby at her breast, crooning: 

"Hush-a-bye baby, daddy will come, 

"When the war's over daddy will come." 

107 



Yet there is hope. Even as scarlet tulips 

Bloom from black earth 

So in the trenches digged by Hate — 

No, not by Hate, but by Greed — 

Brotherhood insists upon blossoming. 

The common men put forward to kill each other 

Come out from the sloughs of destruction 

And shake hands, knowing no quarrel. 

They talk of Christmas, and fireside, and children. 

Once again they sing together 

The songs of good comrades, 

And if they speak of killing 

It is not of killing each other. 

The sky was pitchy black with rolling clouds. 
Lightning poured as blood, and thunder shook 
The world. The air was sick with the salt sweet 
Smell of blood; heavy with the sighs of widows. 
Across the darkened plain the Devil led 
His obscene Brood — A monster which has littered. 
Thick as ants they crippled after him, 
Hobbling like broken grasshoppers, 
Writhing like wounded snakes. 
Behind them the silence of Desolation. 

I stood upon the top of the world 

Where the ages had battled unto fruitfulness 

And the Earth exhibited her scars. 

White-footed Day sped past me 

And shook his defiant lances against the gloom. 

From a poplar torn by shells 

A thrush whistled a tune. 

Sparrows nested in a skull 

That lay in a furrow plowed by a shell. 

And a wren, scarce larger than a bullet, 

1 08 



Built in the chimney of a ruined cottage. 

A little brook washed itself clean 

And ceased not from its song. 

Nature passed by, serene, careless, indifferent, 

Unchanging, triumphant; 

As it was from the beginning. 

She sat down in the portico of her temple, 

Weaving ceaselessly a web of beauty. 

Evening drew her crimson veil about her ankles 

And stepped down into the flowing purple. 

Imperious Night waved a jeweled sceptre 

And her torchbearer paced the eternal beat. 

The Battle snored fitfully, an ogre surfeited. 

Soul-Parting Dawn crept from the pale, 

Reluctant East, and the moans of the wounded 

Grew rhythmically weaker. 

Silence stole back shivering, 

Drawing about her the tatters of Hope. 

The dying had time to die. 

War's lullaby was ended. 



LII. 

Broad as the front of the sea, 
Rolling, heaving, advancing, swelling, 
Behold a triumphant multitude. 
It will break in thunder on the shore. 
And the land shall be made clean. 
Above the sea of grey faces 
Writhe two great standards. 
On one is written "Justice." 
On the other "Freedom." 
They are written in blood. 

109 



Onward the tide surges, mounting upward; 

Men with pale faces; 

Women with despairful eyes, 

And little children who have never laughed. 

The banners of their poverty 

Dance like demons, 

And the tramp of their feet 

Is the ponderous throb of an engine 

Without a master. 

They are coming 

From mines, mills and factories; 

From slimy slums of cities; 

From dark and dangerous caverns of the earth; 

From narrow, dripping tunnels of darkness; 

From clamorous, devouring penitentiaries of industry; 

From white-hot hells of furnaces; 

From the mind-maddening laughter of machines, 

And the devouring cruelty of cities. 

Their banners grimace against the dawn, 

And the rags of their misery jump with glee. 

Behind them, hobbling, grinning, leering, 

Scramble the misshapen spawn of Civilization. 

As leaves upon the floor of the November forest 

They cover the earth, and like the rustle of leaves 

Is their breathing: 

"Revolution ! Revolution !" 

They are not going down into the pits. 
They are not marching to the factories. 
They are not going to the furnaces. 
I know they will not turn back 
More than the centuries turn not back. 
More than the relentless rivers turn not back. 
More than the waves turn not back 
Which dash the great ship upon the rocks 

no 



And churn her bones savagely. 

Death sits in the eyes of the imminent host. 

They have accepted the challenge 

And are pressing forward, ready to die. 

Their breasts are naked. 

They have beaten their picks into swords^ 

Their saws into knives. 

Their eyes are fixed. 

They are willing to die. 

Death is their drummer; 

Drumming upon the unknown graves 

Of all the oppressed. 

Like knapsacks on their backs, 

Bowing them over, 

Is the untold suffering of the centuries. 

They are heavy with the martyrs of the ages: 

The unimagined, patient Poor 

Whose blood has forever welled up 

About the knees of Oppression. 

Revolution, dark and brooding angel; 

Only ministrant who lifts up the bruised head; 

Nurse who wipes the blood from martyr lips 

And gives rebels to drink of life-giving waters; 

Savior and Preserver; 

Helper and Deliverer; 

Your hands are gilt with crimson. 

Your feet are the strong feet of a runner. 

Your head is crowned with a crown of thorns, 

And precious drops drip down 

Your resolute face. 

Dread Angel of the Awful Presence, 

Open and set the captives free. 

Dark, silent, loving, cruel and merciful One, 

Hold yourself not aloof. 

in 



You are our hope; 

Our only redeemer. 

Come, with thunder and with lightning, 

That the air may be clear. 

Come, with deluge and tempest, 

That the Earth may be purified. 

Come, with agony and bloody rain, 

That Life may be made anew. 

Pitch head-long from the cloudy battlements 

And with heavenly fire utterly destroy 

This distorted and misshapen world, 

That another may arise in beauty, 

And the little children be born into joy. 



us 



A Masque of Love 

Octavo. Boards. Italian hand-made 
linen. Walter Hill, Publisher, 
Chicago. $1.50 

The Poet in the Desert 

Octavo. Boards. Published by the 
Author. Edition practically exhausted 
— about 25 copies left. $1.00 

Maia 

A Tale of Love and the Seasons, in 
Sonnet Sequence with Lyrics. With 
twelve full-page decorations and a 
tailpiece in photogravure by Alfred 
Laurens Brennan. Folio. Boards. 
Fabriano hand-made paper. Gothic 
type. Published by the Author. 
Fifty copies for sale. $50.00 



